Tigress: One Dragon's Pain
by Crusader Dragon Alpha
Summary: A tiger with a broken heart. A Wanderer with dark secrets. When the wandering warrior, Lokahviing, is accepted into the Jade Palace, a torrent of mystery and pain is unleashed as the Students of the Jade Palace try to befriend the traveler. Can Tigress and her friends piece together the dark, tragic tale of the immortal Dragon Prince? Or will he succumb to centuries-old wounds?
1. Tigress: One Dragon's Pain, Prologue

**Kung Fu Panda's Master Tigress in:**

 **Chronicles of the Dragon Prince I:**

 **One Dragon's Pain**

(I do not own Kung Fu Panda, Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, Sins of a Solar Empire, the Elder Scrolls, or any other franchises I may not have mentioned due to poor memory.)

Prologue

 _Pain. Everyone feels it at some point in their lives. For some, it's easy to shrug it off, keep moving forward. For others, it drives them insane. Everyone copes with it in different ways. If one is fortunate, they don't feel a lot of pain in their lifetime. If one is not, they are in pain for as long as they can remember. As was said before, some merely shrug it off and keep moving. Such individuals never see how deep the pain of others less fortunate goes. However, there are those rare individuals who, while tormented daily by their pain and suffering, somehow find the strength to keep going. A blind drive forward they neither understand nor question._

 _This is a story set around one such individual._

 _I shan't tell you this person's name – that, dear reader, is a discovery I leave to you. I will tell you, however, that in the times after the defeat of Lord Shen, the master of the Jade Palace, Shifu, decided it prudent, for one reason or another, to adopt new talent for the Jade Palace. The reasoning behind it was not clear, but it was told to the Furious Fighters that, in what could only be described as a paranormal incident shared by Shifu and Po, the late Master Oogway told of a new warrior that would come to them from a far-away land. He would be a strange, possessing a great intelligence, skills never before seen, powers beyond imagination, and a dark secret he would hide with all his might. If the Furious Fighters – Tigress, especially, though it was not clear why – were willing to nurture him, care for him, he would become an invaluable member of the group._

 _So the master and his students sat vigilant, looking for this warrior, who Oogway would only describe as a man, dressed in tattered robes, claiming himself to be but a mere wanderer. For months, they watched. In this time, Tigress began to develop feelings for Po – only to have them shattered when he gave his heart to Song, formerly of the Ladies of the Shade, now walking the path of redemption. The warrior they all watched for then took on an all-new meaning to Tigress, as she hoped he would bring her peace. Then, on one fateful afternoon, as Tigress headed for a meal at Mr. Ping's Noodle Shop..._

 _…_ _Their hopes were answered._

Tigress descended into the Valley of Peace with an empty stomach. Po wanted to be alone with Song, and at this point, while Tigress was still heartbroken, she didn't care. Po had repeatedly stated they were still friends, but it felt like an empty consolation. But, if what Shifu had said was accurate, she would find peace in the Wanderer. She had high hopes for that. But she wasn't expecting it to be easy.

She reached the base of the steps and headed into the village proper, the townsfolk generally staying out of her way. It was a familiar voice that stopped Tigress.

"Having lunch alone, again?"

"Not much choice, Mei Ling," Tigress answered. "Po wanted to be alone with Song, and at this point, I could care less either way."

"He's still your friend," Mei Ling commented. "Least you could do is be his."

"It still feels like an empty consolation," Tigress sighed. "Which is why the Wanderer is so important to me now."

"Speaking of the wanderer, you never told me what he was supposed to look like," interjected Mei Ling.

"Primarily because I don't have much to go on – just that he'd be a foreigner dressed in tattered robes," Tigress explained. "Someone like that-"

"Would stick out like a sore thumb – in fact, I noticed someone like that heading for Ping's noodle shop," Mei Ling finished.

Tigress' head snapped around to look Mei Ling in the eye. "You did?! When?!" she demanded.

"Whoa, Tigress! Calm down! I only noticed him five minutes ago! I doubt he's gone anywhere that soon!" Mei Ling said defensively.

"I have to see him!" Tigress exclaimed, starting for Ping's. She was quickly stopped by Mei Ling grabbing her arm.

"I know you have been eager than the rest to meet the Wanderer, but you shouldn't rush it; take it slow. I'll go with you," Mei Ling said. Tigress sighed, then nodded, and she and Mei Ling started for Ping's restaurant. They entered, but stopped just past the entrance; sitting alone at a table was a strange creature; nearly furless, with no tail, but tan skin, a somewhat trimmed goatee, and dressed in tattered robes that gave him a ghostly appearance, like that of a deathly wraith. Attached to his belt was a strange item, shaped like a cross, but ornate and metallic.

"Is that the Wanderer you were looking out for?" Mei Ling asked.

"Only one way to find out," Tigress responded.

Before Tigress or Mei Ling could move to speak to the man, a band of thugs consisting of two felines, a lupine, and a rodent approached the man. "Well, well – looks like we got a new visitor in the Valley," the Rodent commented.

"Did you pay the toll?" the feline asked. "Anyone entering the valley for the first time pays the toll."

"I was unaware of any toll required by a band of two-bit bandits too weak to get a job," the wanderer responded. "Piss off, and I'll forget I spoke to you."

"You got a lot of nerve, talking to us like that," the lupine growled. He brandished a knife and held it at the Wanderer's throat, eliciting gasps and murmurs from the crowd. As much as Tigress wanted to intercede, she found it more fascinating to watch as the situation unfolds. "Hand over the toll," the lupine threatened, "Or I'll cut your throat."

"If you really were as murderous as your little show implies, you'd have slit my throat as an example to others thinking of defying you," the wanderer said calmly, unintimidated by the blade at his throat. "This is not the first time I've had a knife to my throat. I am not intimidated by your posturing – so piss off, find a job, and stop trolling the people who come and go."

The lupine pressed the blade just beneath the wanderer's jaw, where his carotid artery was. "You've got three seconds to hand over the toll before I paint the table red!" he growled.

"Go ahead," the wanderer taunted the lupine. "Watch what happens." The lupine's face contorted, and he...

But something happened. The wanderer moved with blazing speed, disarming the lupine, then throwing a right hook, then a left, spinning and then bringing his right foot across the lupine's face. The lupine recoiled and hit the ground, dazed, and his friends stared in awe as the wanderer seemingly stood in what Tigress assumed was a fighting stance, but soon stood upright. "Now that is just a tiny taste of what I am capable of," the wanderer stated. "If any of you have any gray matter left, you'll take your injured comrade and get the fuck out of my face before you provoke a response far beyond your capacity to understand, let alone combat."

"Looks like we got ourselves a tough guy, boys," the lupine chuckled. "We do this the old-fashioned way!"

"You sure that's a good idea, Chang?" Tigress asked the lupine. "He disarmed you and knocked you off your feet in a couple of seconds. You really think your gang has a better chance?"

Chang didn't seem to hear Tigress as he and his friends rushed the wanderer. The wanderer did not hesitate, as he went for the metallic cross on his belt, raised it, and it made an electric crackling noise as a fiery-looking violet blade and cross guard flared from the cross. It was then that Tigress realized that it was a weapon, one that neither Tigress nor Mei Ling, much less anyone in the valley, had ever seen before. The wanderer held his weapon at the ready as the thugs charged him, and in a blur of violet light, he downed all but Chang. He put a slice on his right shoulder, then his left leg, made what appeared to be a grabbing gesture, and telekinetically lifted him off his feet – evidently by his throat, Tigress surmised, given how Chang was coughing and choking. Upon looking around, she realized Chang's friends weren't dead, merely suffering injuries that would heal, given time.

"I could have killed them all," the wanderer told Chang, "I could have killed _you_. Fortunately for you and your friends, I can be merciful, if blunt. This will be the last time I tell you – take your friends and fuck off! Even twitch in this general direction ever again, and you will learn in the worst of ways that I can be merciless, as well."

"Who... what the hell are you?" Chang gurgled out.

The wanderer brought Chang's face within inches of his before saying, "I'm the last person in the world you want to fuck with." With that, he telekinetically hurled Chang against the wall, who collided with it and dropped to the ground. He and his friends eventually got up and limped out of the restaurant while the wanderer went back to the meal so rudely interrupted by Chang and his bandits. Tigress, however, mentally went over what had just transpired, trying to make sense of it. This had to be him. It had to be – only the wanderer described to her by Po and Shifu could do what this man had done.

As much as Tigress wanted to greet the man, she was almost afraid to – between the strange sword, his ghostly appearance, and how he just downed a four-man gang in seconds, she almost wanted to let him be, let him cool off before approaching him. Almost. But not quite, she found, as she started to walk over beside the man. She struggled with what to say to the man, and was still working it out in her head when he said without looking at her, "You can sit down if you want; I don't bite." Tigress and Mei Ling sat down next to the man as he ate.

"I have to say," Mei Ling commented in an effort to break the ice, "I've never seen a weapon like yours – where'd you get it?"

"Made it," the Wanderer replied. "It was the first weapon I ever made. An old – even ancient – design, but undeniably effective."

"What is it called, if I may ask?" Tigress asked.

"Where I'm from... it's called a Lightsaber," the Wanderer responded. "And the one you saw me use, specifically, is a rare lightsaber called a Crossguard Lightsaber."

"You said 'where you are from'," Tigress said. "Where is that?"

The Wanderer paused, as though Tigress touched a sensitive subject. "Where I am from... is a subject I prefer not to talk about. Suffice to say, I hail from a place far from here. A place I can never go back to. And I'd prefer to leave it at that," he responded, his voice having an angry thrum that wasn't there before.

Mei Ling looked to Tigress, and though she didn't speak, Tigress got the message: "Don't push." Tigress' voice was even when she spoke again: "So what brings you to the Valley of Peace?"

"I'm just a wanderer, passing through on his way to parts unknown," he said, the angry thrum gone.

There it was, just as Oogway had told Shifu and Po. A man, claiming to be a mere wanderer, dressed in tattered robes, possessing powers and skills Tigress had never seen... it all fit. She was convinced: This was the man they all were looking for. He had to be.

"Have you ever... thought about settling somewhere?" Tigress asked.

"As much as I like the idea... I've yet to find a place that would openly accept me. My display earlier may have already caused the repercussions I have come to expect in new communities I travel to – they may already be hoping I leave them in peace," the wanderer replied.

"I beg to differ," came Mr. Ping's voice as the aging goose came out with a bowl of soup. "Those thugs have been a thorn in our side for a good long time. No matter how many times Po and his friends drive them off, they keep coming back."

"Mister Ping speaks true," Tigress agreed. "This was the eighth time they've accosted people here, and we've warned them before. Honestly, with as vicious as you were, I'm surprised you didn't kill them outright."

"There wasn't anything to be gained by killing them," the wanderer commented. "And I don't kill unless provoked." He then turned his head to look Tigress in the eyes, and she, for the first time, saw his – narrow, black slits surrounded by a pool of crimson that seemed to be changing color. "And you haven't seen me provoked in that way, nor should you desire to; few have ever witnessed the fury of a _dovah_ ; fewer still have survived it."

"Well, regardless, if you restrained yourself from killing those bandits, the people in this valley could use another hero like you," Ping stated, setting the bowl of soup before the wanderer.

"I agree," Tigress added. "We in the Jade Palace have been looking for new talent."

"No," the wanderer sighed, "You weren't. You were looking for _me_." Tigress' face portrayed a look of shock. How did he know...?

"How do you know that?" Mei Ling asked.

"I am not a moron," the wanderer growled. "Look around you; I can guarantee you, there are at least a half-dozen or more people who could be suitable candidates for 'new talent'. I have long heard of the warriors of the Jade Palace – never once did I hear they were looking for new talent. Yet, I come here, down a band of bandits without killing or even seriously injuring them, and you and Tigress and Mister Ping tell me I should stay, saying the master of the Jade Palace is looking for new talent. If you were, you could have easily found it in among the populace here. So, in conclusion, you were not looking for new talent, you were looking for me – and my instincts tell me that someone among you foresaw my arrival. Now, are you going to keep playing me for an idiot?"

There was the final piece. A great intelligence. There was no doubt in Tigress' mind. This was the man they had been watching for. She stayed Mei Ling from tearing into him before she spoke: "We mean not to insult your intelligence, wanderer. You are correct – we had been watching for you. Our master, Shifu, and the Dragon Warrior, Po, spoke with our late Master Oogway on this matter – it was he that told us you would come to us."

"Oogway..." the wanderer murmured, as though hearing the name of an old friend. His eyes went from the crimson red Tigress saw earlier to a sapphire-blue. "Aged turtle, walks with a staff with a crescent formation at the top, long nails?"

Tigress frowned slightly. "You know him?" she inquired.

The wanderer sighed, rubbing his temple. "As though he knew why I wandered, what I searched for... he was the one who sent me here," he answered. There was a long, uncomfortable pause, while all of this was taken in. Finally, the wanderer downed his soup and rose to his feet. "It seems my destiny – whatever it is – lies here... Master Tigress. So, if only to meet destiny head-on... even though I don't claim to be an ardent believer in such things... I have little choice but to stay here."

Tigress was elated. She rose to her feet as calmly as she could, struggling to contain herself. She felt new hope burning inside. "Well, if you're going to stay here... we'll need to know your name."

"My name... is not something I allow to be widely known. For now... call me Lokahviing," the wanderer requested. As much as Tigress wanted to know his real name, she knew better than to press too soon. She started for the exit, and began the long ascent to the Jade Palace, with Lokahviing walking behind her.


	2. Tigress: One Dragon's Pain, Chapter One

Chapter One

The ascent up the steps to the Jade Palace was faster than Tigress remembered, as her attention was on Lokahviing. His form, his walk... it spoke to her. He carried a great burden, something that weighed him down. Something in his past, perhaps? Something he did? Or saw? Something in his memories, even? She didn't know. But she found she was intent on finding out. Regardless, before she realized it, they were walking across the courtyard, where, so long ago, Po was chosen by Master Oogway as the Dragon Warrior.

"I know what that's like, you know," Lokahviing's voice snapped Tigress out of her thoughts.

"What what's like?" Tigress asked.

"Don't try and tell me every time you walk through this courtyard, you don't feel the sting of denial – how Po was chosen as the Dragon Warrior when it seemed you were about to receive that honor," Lokahviing answered. "I know what that kind of denial feels like. How you're poised to get something great, and then you are suddenly denied what you were about to get, and see it given to someone you thought didn't deserve it."

Tigress was initially shocked, but realized he was right. There was still some part of her that resented Po for that incident. But now, she was curious: "What were you denied?" she asked.

Lokahviing paused, still walking, before he answered: "Something far greater than the mantle of Dragon Warrior... something I felt I had earned over a childhood of blood, pain, and suffering, and it was something that was given to my younger brother, the favored child, after he came home from prison when he should have stayed there."

"And what was that?" Tigress inquired.

Lokahviing stopped in his tracks with a sigh. "A life of my own, free from my tyrant ex-stepfather's machinations and independent of my mother, whose blindness to truth and unwillingness to believe she was wrong about me led me to eventually choose the life of a wanderer," he explained. "My mother was poised to give me my freedom, to let me live my life in happiness. Then, my prodigal younger brother came home from prison... and everything changed. Mother gave him the life I was going to get, and she started saying I was too unstable, too... different, to be out on my own. She denied me what I had earned over the course of my sad childhood – if 'childhood' could even be used to describe my early years, seeing as she refused to allow me to be a child – and gave it to her favored son."

As he spoke, Tigress saw Lokahviing's eyes – even though he was not looking at her – go from blue to red. This story angered him. She acted to keep from digging too deep before either of them were ready. "Say no more – it was wrong of me to ask of it, and I am sorry," she apologized.

Lokahviing scoffed and shook his head. "There was no way you could have known. I was just a wandering warrior, passing through here on his way to parts unknown before you showed up. If anything, the blame lies with me, for speaking of how I know what denial feels like."

It was then that another voice made himself known. "Tigress... might I ask who your friend is?" Tigress looked over to see Shifu approaching them. His sudden voice, however, evidently startled Lokahviing, as his crossguard lightsaber flared, and he held the violet blade at the ready, breathing heavily. Tigress immediately put herself between him and Shifu.

"It's okay! It's alright! That's just Master Shifu!" she told Lokahviing in an effort to diffuse him. Lokahviing looked to Master Shifu, frowned, and extinguished his weapon.

"My apologies," he said, heaving a sigh. "You startled me."

Shifu's attention, evidently, was on something else. "That weapon of yours... I've never seen a sword like that in all my years! Where did you get it?"

"As I explained to Tigress... I made it. It's one of three lightsabers I made," Lokahviing responded.

"You have others?" Shifu asked. "May I see them?"

Lokahviing clipped his crossguard lightsaber to his belt, reached into his robes, and retrieved two identical lightsaber hilts – ones that had a tubular design, with black metallic flanges protruding along the circumference of the bottom third of the hilts, while the upper part of the hilts were shaped somewhat like stunted drinking glasses. Gesturing with one, then the other, crimson blades flared to life with a hissing sound that made Tigress shudder.

* _snap-hiss, snap-hiss*_

Lokahviing twirled the twin blades and held them in a stance Tigress hadn't seen before, with the right-hand blade held over and across his head, and the left-hand blade held across his right side. "When provoked, I typically use these," Lokahviing said. "But not just as dual blades." He connected the bottoms of the hilts, twisted them, and Tigress heard a _click!_ As the hilts locked, and Lokahviing then twirled the now-staff lightsaber, the blades humming loudly.

"Magnificent," Shifu commented. Lokahviing broke the staff and extinguished the blades, storing them again in his robes.

"Magnificent isn't the first thing that comes to mind when one sees me fight with the crimson blades," Lokahviing said. "Terrifying is more accurate. When provoked to fighting with the crimson blades, I am utterly merciless, with a viciousness never before seen and machine-like efficiency. And I pray you _never_ have to see me like that."

"Why is that?" Shifu asked.

Lokahviing knelt down to Shifu's level and put his face near his. "Because once I am provoked into such a fight, and into such a rage, I don't stop until my enemies lie dead at my feet. Few things bring me out of such a rampage; as I explained to Tigress, few have ever witnessed the fury of a _dovah_ – fewer still have survived it." That said, Lokahviing rose to his feet and looked around.

"Tigress, why don't you show... ah, right, I never got your name," Shifu stated.

"My name is unimportant – as I told Tigress... call me Lokahviing," Lokahviing answered.

"Well, Tigress, why don't you show Lokahviing to his room?" Shifu suggested.

"Yes, master," Tigress replied with a bow. As Shifu left, Tigress could hear a strange, reverberant growl creep from Lokahviing's throat. "This way, Lokahviing – maybe later, I can introduce you to the others."

"The others?" Lokahviing repeated, paused, then added, "Ah, yes – the others. The Furious Five, plus Master Po. Admittedly, to encompass all of you, I came to call you the Furious Fighters, as after Po joined you, you were no longer five in number."

Tigress smiled as she led Lokahviing toward the living area. "You weren't the only one," she told him. The two went into the dorm area, where Tigress led Lokahviing to an empty room. Lokahviing took two steps inside, gestured, and nearly instantaneously, varied items appeared all around the room. On the opposite end of the room was a strange, translucent device that Tigress didn't recognize. Lokahviing sat down in a chair seemingly made of the same translucent material, pressed his hand against a panel, and the device came to life, with symbols and readouts Tigress couldn't read.

"What is that?" Tigress queried.

"Portable Computer Terminal," Lokahviing answered. "Manages everything I have connected in this room, and provides direct access to..." Lokahviing stopped, reason unclear.

"Provides direct access to... what?" Tigress asked.

"Never mind that," Lokahviing responded, "But it also manages the acoustic dampening field for this room – and trust me, when it comes to sleep, you'll thank me for having this."

"How so? What does it do?" Tigress inquired.

"It blocks all sound coming from this room," Lokahviing explained. "Handy, considering how badly I snore."

Tigress chuckled, "Can't be any worse than Po's snoring."

Lokahviing was unamused. "I'm not kidding. My snoring... is unlike anything you've ever heard. It is not-"

"I'll judge that for myself, thank you," Tigress said. "I doubt it is that bad. However-"

"Tigress, who are you talking to in there?" came a male voice as a large Panda came around the corner. Tigress froze, never looking back at the panda.

"Master Po... meet Lokahviing, our newest student here," she said.

Po looked between Tigress and Lokahviing, who was now rising from his seat. That same reverberant growl crept out of Lokahviing's throat as he stared Po down, his hand resting on his crossguard lightsaber.

"Hey, pal, don't try and-" Po started.

"Po – take it from a friend, you don't want to provoke Lokahviing – he's far more than any of us can handle," Tigress cut him off. She directed her next comment to Lokahviing: "And Lokahviing... he's a friend. You've no reason to threaten him."

Lokahviing looked between Tigress and Po, his hand moving away from his lightsaber. It was then that another female made herself known: "Po, are you agitating Tigress again? She-" As Song arrived, she froze upon sight of Lokahviing, slightly trembling as though seeing a ghost from her past. "You...!" she whispered.

"You two know each other?" Tigress asked.

"Not personally," Lokahviing admitted. "But this is not the first time our paths have crossed."

"Lokahviing was the one who set me on the path of redemption," Song said. "He is why I sought you out."

"And you didn't think our paths would cross again, did you?" Lokahviing queried.

"Admittedly not," Song affirmed. "I heard rumors that you'd been killed somewhere up north."

"I came close to death, yes – closer than I'd like," Lokahviing stated. "But that is a tale for another time."

"Well, perhaps we could discuss it over dinner," Po suggested. "Regardless, Master Shifu wants to see you in the training room."

Lokahviing raised an eyebrow. "What for?" he asked.

"He wants to see firsthand what you're capable of," Po responded. "And, admittedly, I am a bit curious, as well."

Lokahviing sighed wearily. "Very well – lead the way."

Lokahviing, Tigress, Po and Song all headed for the training room, where Crane, Viper, Mantis and Monkey were all waiting with Shifu. "Lokahviing, I presume?" greeted Crane.

"You presume correctly, master..." Lokahviing responded, leaving off for the others to introduce themselves.

"Crane," Crane introduced himself. "The others are Monkey, Mantis, and Viper. Master Shifu, you already met."

"Indeed – and I recall it being said you wanted to see my combat proficiency, master Shifu?" Lokahviing asked.

"Indeed, Lokahviing – I admittedly find myself eager to see how you handle those... 'lightsabers'," Shifu responded. Lokahviing inclined his head to look between Crane and Monkey, seeing the training room behind them. Returning to his original posture, Lokahviing popped his neck.

"Very well. I must warn you, though – I can be difficult to track in combat, and you may want to stand clear."

He then walked past them, gesturing with one hand while grabbing his crossguard lightsaber with the other. Clouds formed momentarily, and then, several thugs of what seemed the same race as Lokahviing, but with tattoos and sunglasses, approached him. They all raised rifles completely alien to Tigress, Shifu and the others, and in a deafening roar, they all fired continuously. Lokahviing simply raised a hand, and the bullets stopped mid-trajectory. When it was clear they weren't going to harm Lokahviing with their gunfire, they all stopped, at which point, Lokahviing lowered his hand, and the varied bullets dropped harmlessly to the floor. The thugs all then rushed him, and Lokahviing engaged. Trying to fight the man was like trying to grapple with a shadow; Lokahviing was a blur, dodging one attack after the other, often redirecting the attacks elsewhere, and it wasn't until his crossguard lightsaber flared that things got interesting – he became a blaze of violet light as he began dispatching the thugs one after the next. But more kept coming. One of them managed to land a minor blow to his thigh, which made a minor spatter of neon-green fluid on the floor. That's when Shifu realized this was more than an illusion; these thugs were a manifestation of Lokahviing's mind, but ones that could do very real harm. Before Shifu could intercede, Lokahviing leapt away, extinguished his crossguard lightsaber, reached into his robes, and retrieved the twin lightsabers, activating them simultaneously and putting himself in what Tigress assumed was his battle stance. The thugs again rushed him with knives, swords, and axes, and Tigress found herself both intrigued and worried. If fighting with Lokahviing was difficult with his crossguard lightsaber, Tigress thought, it was next to _impossible_ when he was wielding those dual crimson lightsabers. He was a whirlwind of crimson death. He wasted little effort dispatching one thug after the other, often slashing off an extremity or two, and even heads, from time to time, until the thugs' appearance dropped off completely, and he began dispatching them like a machine. The last thug put up the best fight, wielding a lightsaber himself, but in the end, he met the same fate as the others, but with Lokahviing leaping over him, giving him an overhead slash to the face that turned him around in pain; then, when he landed, he kicked back, slamming his back to him and forcing his lightsaber through his chest; finally, Lokahviing whirled around and sheared the thug in half.

When silence settled over the room, nearly three dozen bodies lay sprawled about the room before they all vanished in a mist, leaving the room as pristine as before, aside from the one spot where Lokahviing was injured. Neon-green fluid seeped from the cut on his thigh, and that's when Tigress realized it was blood.

Shifu's attention, as before, was elsewhere. "How did you do that?" he asked.

"Do what?" Lokahviing asked back, seemingly not minding the cut on his thigh. "The illusion thugs that I dispatched, or the lightsaber skills?"

"Both," Shifu said.

"The illusion thugs were a... well, an ability in the Force, one that can allow a Force-user to create illusions of anything from the user's mind, and provided the user is skilled enough, the illusions can actually do harm," Lokahviing responded. "I use them for training purposes."

"Illusions that can do harm... like the cut on your thigh?" Tigress asked, indicating the wound. Lokahviing raised an eyebrow, looked down, and noticed it, giving a soft "Hmph" as though he didn't mind.

"It'll heal in a day or so."

"Where did you learn to create illusions like that?" Po queried.

"Far from here, in the swamps of Dromund Kaas," Lokahviing answered. "Not a safe place to be, these days, between the dark force energies, rampant local wildlife, and the occasional Sith apparition."

"What were you doing in such a dangerous place?" Crane inquired. "It sounds like a deathtrap."

"As I told Tigress, I'm a wanderer – I go where I please," Lokahviing told him. "I was merely stopping on Dromund Kaas to... investigate... some rumors I'd heard, rumors of an untouched tomb."

"Ah, so you were a treasure hunter at one point," Shifu said with a smile.

"Admittedly, I still am, to some degree – I'm always up for finding something new and having a new story to tell," Lokahviing stated.

"What about your skills with those lightsabers? Where'd you learn that?" Shifu asked.

"That, master, was learned over the course of many years of traveling the galaxy, fighting varied lightsaber-wielding opponents, and learning from numerous sources. Over time, I've mastered multiple forms and come up with a few of my own."

"The skills you displayed with the crimson blades seemed to be the best among them," Tigress noted. "What form do you call that?"

Lokahviing chuckled. "That, my friend, is known as Jar'Kai – the art of dual lightsaber combat." There was a pause before Tigress asked,

"That wasn't the full extent of your power, was it?"

Lokahviing paused. "So you were paying attention."

"I can tell when someone's holding back," Tigress said with a smug smile.

"Well, in this case, yes – I was. What you saw was merely my combat proficiency. You don't want to see me enraged – it's a sight none so far have been able to handle," Lokahviing answered. He walked toward them, stopping next to Tigress. "Be careful where you dig and what you do – some things about me were never meant for others to see." With that, he walked away, leaving the others staring in awe.

"Man doesn't say much, does he?" Mantis asked no one in particular.

"For someone without much to say, he certainly can say a lot," Viper commented in response to Mantis.

For once, Shifu's attention was where Tigress' attention was. "His walk... he carries a great burden, something that weighs him down."

"I know," Tigress agreed. "And it's something he is reluctant to share. Perhaps, in time, we can get him to open up."

"Agreed," Song said. "But I'm curious as to why he's so..."

"Hostile?" Tigress finished. "I admit, I'm curious about that, myself. But what he needs presently... is time. Let him get settled."

With that said, the others broke up to pursue their daily activities, but all of them had their minds on the new student of the Jade Palace – a man that, evidently, kept a great many secrets. A man that confounded, but also fascinated, Tigress, as she found herself more and more wondering about Lokahviing's shadowy past. Even the name he requested he be called by – Lokahviing. It wasn't a name Tigress was familiar with, and she was certain it had some meaning, but what? And why did he not go by his real name? So many questions raised on day one...

... and Tigress realized, the more he stayed, the more she and her friends got him to open up, the more questions would be raised...


	3. Tigress: One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The day eventually came to an end, and the others sat around the table. Lokahviing sat across from Tigress, absentmindedly eating his soup. None of those present asked anything of him. None of those present spoke to him. They seemed to fear the lightsaber-wielding marauder. And Tigress couldn't stand it.

"Lokahviing," she said, breaking the eerie silence, "I'm curious... you said you were a traveler. Did you ever have a nickname others called you by?"

"Several," Lokahviing answered. "I called them titles. Two of the most common ones were Darth Taral... and _Fal Dovah Kulaan_."

 _There it is again,_ Tigress thought. _The word Dovah._ "The second... title... what does it mean?" Tigress inquired.

"Do you always ask this many questions?" Lokahviing inquired back.

"Though you can be rather curious from time to time, I do admit, this is unlike you, Tigress," Song commented. "What's your interest in Lokahviing?"

"Just trying to get to know him," Tigress responded, "Nothing more."

"Well... since you asked, ' _Fal Dovah Kulaan_ ' is Dovah for 'The Dragon Prince'. And I'll leave it at that, since the origin behind that title... is neither a short nor happy tale," Lokahviing said.

"Dovah..." Viper repeated. "Who speaks Dovah where you're from?"

Lokahviing turned his dragon eyes on Viper, and they seemed to freeze her. "Dragons, master Viper. Dovah is the language of dragons. Dovah literally means Dragon."

Though she hid it, Tigress was shocked. _Few have ever witnessed the fury of a dovah,_ Lokahviing had said when she first met him. Could Lokahviing really be saying what Tigress thought he was? That he was, in fact, a Dragon? How was such a thing possible?

"Tigress?" Po spoke, snapping Tigress from her thoughts.

"Apologies... I was distracted," Tigress apologized. "Regardless... your name, Lokahviing... is that Dovah?"

Lokahviing nodded. "It is," he affirmed. "And before you ask, it means 'Winged Sky Hunter'."

"How did you come to be called by this name?" Tigress asked.

"A kind, aged dragon I knew as Paarthurnax gave it to me," Lokahviing answered.

"Is he still alive?" Tigress asked, refraining from asking if this Paarthurnax was dead. Lokahviing opened his mouth to speak, but no words were uttered. It was as though he couldn't bring himself to answer.

"I don't know," he finally said. "I met him... oh, f... Many years into my travels. He was the one who taught me the ways of the Thu'um, back when all I had been using was the Force. Back when I went by... Darth Taral."

"That name... sounds sinister," Shifu remarked. "And you say it with such... anger."

"It's a sith name," Lokahviing said. "It means Dark Marauder... which is what I... what I became, twenty years after I left my homeland."

"What happened?" Viper asked in a soft tone.

"What happened to Paarthurnax?" Tigress asked before Lokahviing could answer Viper, violent or no.

"Again, I don't know," Lokahviing answered. "He was... caught up in a feud between two clandestine groups – the Blades and the Thalmor. I like to think he's alive, but... I've heard stories about what both groups did to dragons in the wake of the rise of Dovahkiin." He then inhaled, then heaved a trembling exhale, as though...

He abruptly got up and left, leaving the others staring after him. "A great burden indeed, though I suspect that is not the whole story," Shifu commented.

"And we should not press him to reveal too much to us before he's ready, _Viper_ ," Tigress told Viper. "I know. I asked about his homeland, and given his response, I am certain he is not ready to share with us what happened to him in his homeland."

"Why? What did he say?" Po asked.

"He said, and I quote, 'where I am from... is a subject I prefer not to talk about. Suffice to say, I hail from a place far from here. A place I can never go back to. And I'd prefer to leave it at that.' I suspect something happened to him there, something that haunts him still, and I was only told a precious few details; I do not want to, however, nor should any of you, press for that part of his past before he's ready to tell us," Tigress explained.

"I can agree with that," Shifu agreed. "I think we've pried enough from him, tonight."

"Even so," Song interjected, "I want to know what happened to him."

"You aren't the only one," Tigress said. "We will know in time. Now, we should finish out meals before they go cold."

After that, dinner was silently eaten, and it was when everyone was heading to their rooms that they heard the strangest sound. The closer to the rooms they got, the louder it became, until they realized it was coming from Lokahviing's room. Tigress quietly opened the door, and noticed Lokahviing, fast asleep. He snored loudly, but while it was not as loud as Tigress knew Po's snoring to be, it was, as Lokahviing had warned, unlike anything Tigress had ever heard. He sounded as though a great beast were asleep; his deep, raspy inhaling, followed by the long, thrumming exhale...

… made him sound like a dragon in his lair, Tigress thought. "That's quite a snore," Po whispered.

"No worse than you, dear," Song whispered back. Tigress stepped back, and as she was turning away, she saw the computer terminal was active, displaying a list of items, though Tigress couldn't read them. There also looked like a near-empty bar, and her ears began to pick up a barely-audible sound she couldn't make out. She approached the screen, tapped the bar at a one-quarter area on instinct, and was greeted by a soft, slow melody of violins, string instruments, quiet brass instruments and soft drums accompanied by a soft chorus.

Music unlike anything Tigress had ever heard before. Tigress looked down at Lokahviing to see he was still out cold, so she left his music as it was and left his room, shutting the door on her way out. The music was barely heard outside the room.

"I had no idea he had any interest in music," Viper murmured as they all went to their respective rooms. Tigress said nothing as she went into her room and shut the door, still faintly hearing Lokahviing's snoring. She drifted off to sleep minutes later, still thinking of the new student of the Jade Palace...

Tigress awoke in the early hours of the morning, for what reason she couldn't discern. Upon stilling her breathing to listen to the air, she heard Lokahviing's distinct voice, talking in his sleep, speaking a language she could not understand. She slowly stepped out of her room, looking toward Lokahviing's room. A few of the others were doing the same, wondering what it was that Lokahviing was dreaming about. It was a complete surprise, then, when Lokahviing suddenly awoke with a reverberating roar unlike any creature anyone present had ever heard before. Tigress nearly jumped out of her skin hearing this, as did everyone in the immediate vicinity. Anyone who wasn't in the hallway leapt out of their rooms and into the hall to investigate – but after that reverberating roar, silence fell over the area. As much as she wanted to, Tigress found she was absolutely terrified to enter his room. They all retreated back into their rooms, never hearing another sound from Lokahviing's room other than his heavy breathing, and for a while, Tigress could swear she heard him crying.

When morning gong sounded, everyone was up in the hallway, except for Lokahviing. They all went to breakfast, and Po handed out the food when Lokahviing's door could be heard opening, and minutes later, he plodded into the dining area, sitting down heavily in the chair heaving a trembling sigh. He daren't look anyone in the eye. He never even raised his head. Tigress, sitting right next to him, placed a hand over his loosely-clenched fist and asked, "Are you alright?" At first, Lokahviing didn't answer, his breathing sounding erratic.

"One... doesn't see some of the things I've seen in my travels and emerge from the experience... unscathed," he finally said, his voice shaking. He lifted his head to look at Tigress, and she saw he _was_ crying. "It happened so many years ago, and still, it haunts me as though it happened yesterday."

"What happened?" Tigress asked softly.

"The Empire... I... had been dreaming of the Rise of the Empire," Lokahviing answered, his voice hoarse. "What... I remember about the rise of the Empire is... is how quiet it was. During the waning hours of the Clone Wars, the Republic five-oh-first legion was discreetly transferred back to Coruscant. I imagine... it was a silent trip for them. They all knew what was about to happen, and what they were about to do. Even today, I wonder... did any of them have any doubts? Any private, traitorous thoughts? Perhaps... and perhaps not. Either way... they never said a word. Not on the flight to Coruscant, not when Order Sixty-Six came down, and not when they marched into the Jedi Temple... not a word."

"You say that like you know from firsthand experience," Song remarked. "Like you were there."

Tigress gently gripped Lokahviing's hand as she affirmed, "He was."

As though to affirm this himself, Lokahviing went on, "I remember being in my dorm when I heard the marching. I looked out the window to see... battalions of those blue-striped clone troops, led by one Jedi – the one we all knew was Anakin Skywalker. I... I used a pair of binoculars, and even as far as I was, I could tell that Anakin was not himself... he was... wrong, somehow – twisted. I knew then and there, something was... horribly wrong. I knew I had to get out. I packed my bags, started to leave, but I was too slow – I had barely gotten out of my room when the lasers started flying. So I ran. Like a coward."

"You did what you had to to survive," Song assured him. "You were facing down far more troops than you could have handled."

"Even so," Lokahviing growled, "I should have fought them. But all I did was ran as those clones shot dead anyone who had a lightsaber. Anyone."

"If you had fought them, you'd have been slaughtered like the rest, as you had implied," Shifu said. "We won't hold against you doing what you had to for survival."

"Slaughtered?" Lokahviing hissed, his eyes narrowing on Shifu. He shook his head, then added, "No – I've seen slaughter. What I saw that night at the Jedi Temple... was a massacre. Those clones and that twisted abomination that once I called Master Skywalker killed everything in their path. Men. Women. _Children_ , even." he leaned over the table, as though to loom over Shifu. "Do you know what it takes, to kill a child? Do you know what that can do to you? How deeply even seeing children cut down like that can scar you?"

Shifu shook his head. "No, I don't," he admitted. "And I'm sorry you were forced to endure that." Lokahviing sat back in his chair with a trembled sigh. With a shake of his head, he told Shifu in a much less hostile tone,

"It's not your fault. You didn't put this pain on me, so unless you gave out Order Sixty-Six, don't take blame that's not due."

"How did you get out of there?" Viper asked.

"I escaped the temple on a stolen personal craft – the then-Imperial forces shot me down, but I crash-landed near where I'd hidden my personal starfighter, and I just ran like hell there, got in, powered up, blasted off Coruscant, and linked up with my carrier ship and left that place, never once looking back," Lokahviing answered.

"The ship you escaped on – where is it now?" Tigress asked.

"The starfighter or the Carrier ship I mentioned?" Lokahviing asked back.

"Both," Tigress clarified.

Lokahviing heaved a sigh. "My fighter craft is aboard my carrier ship. The carrier ship... is hidden. And hidden it will remain until the day I decide I must use it again."

"Let's hope you never have to use it again – that the Jade Palace becomes your home, and you come to feel you no longer have to wander," Tigress said softly.

"Even so, my ship has my collection of... trophies, items I had gathered in my travels," Lokahviing sighed.

There was a pause before Tigress queried, "Does your computer have direct access to your ship?"

Lokahviing chuckled weakly. "Nothing gets by you, does it?"

"Neither does anything get by you, Lokahviing," Tigress told him with a smile. Lokahviing gently squeezed her hand, then said,

"I'm sorry to drag you through elements of my past. Honestly... I didn't think any of you'd want to hear it."

Shifu shook his head. "There's a lot you don't know about us, Lokahviing; here in the Jade Palace, we take care of our own... including being there for our own as comfort and support as one of us tells us of how he was forced to witness a horrid massacre of people he once called friends."

"Even so, I would imagine you all have better things to do than listen to my old sob stories," Lokahviing said.

"It's quite alright, Lokahviing," Shifu assured him. "But to be honest... I had no idea you had seen such a horror."

"Coruscant wasn't the first time I saw such a massacre," Lokahviing told him. "And knowing my history... I fear it won't be the last."

"You saw other massacres?" Shifu asked. "Where?"

"Circinius IV, to name one," Lokahviing answered. "But that is a tale for another time."

"Fair enough," Shifu said. "I won't force you to say anything more."

"Coruscant... Circinius IV... These aren't places I am familiar with," Po commented. "Where are they?"

"Among the stars, Po... among the stars," Lokahviing sighed.

It took moments for the revelation to dawn. "You're... from another world!" Po gasped as his eyes went wide.

"Yes... I've been wandering the stars for a very long time. But I'd prefer to discuss that another time," Lokahviing said. He then turned to his food, and for that meal, nary a word was said regarding Lokahviing's past, still shrouded in mystery and shadow.


	4. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Lokahviing, Tigress, Po and Song descended into the Valley after the morning meal, intent on helping out the villagers wherever they could. Lokahviing was still dressed in the same tattered robes he was when he first arrived in the Valley.

"Lokahviing... why do you wear those?" Song asked.

"Personal reasons," Lokahviing answered. "I prefer to maintain appearances as a deterrent for those thinking of challenging me."

"Maybe, but it also makes people fear you – people who shouldn't have any reason to," Song suggested. Lokahviing curled his lips and nodded.

"Indeed... quite the conundrum. How do you suppose we resolve it?"

"A change of clothes would suffice," Tigress replied. "And there's a clothing shop up ahead."

The four of them headed into a clothing shop, where Lokahviing paused to view the merchandise. A soft growl could be heard from Lokahviing's throat, causing concerned looks in Po and Song.

"Easy, Lokahviing... there's-" Tigress began.

"Something's not right, here," Lokahviing whispered hoarsely. "The shopkeeper – she's entirely too frightened to be shaking like that from me."

Shifu's voice was then known. "Is something wrong?"

"N-no, every-thing's... fine," the shopkeeper stammered. This served to elicit another dragon growl.

"That's what every shopkeeper, bartender, barmaid, and tavern keeper says when they're secretly being held... hostage," Lokahviing said with a deep, intimidating voice that was not his. He inhaled deeply through his nose, then exhaled with that same draconic thrum Tigress heard in his sleeping breaths. "I sssmell you... thief in the shadows," he said with that intimidating voice. He began moving among the clothes. "Why do you hide? What is there to fear, thief, if you've the nerve to hold a shopkeeper hostage in broad daylight?" He growled again, and Tigress' ears picked up a faint, fearful whimper. Lokahviing inhaled again, and continued, "You... you carry something with you, something... not of this world. Gloves made of... beskar, but housing something far more... dangeroussss..." He made his way toward the back of the shop, where the dressing rooms were. "Even now, you cradle it, as though it is all that gives you life." He opened one of the doors, revealing an empty dressing room. "You made a mistake, hiding in these rooms... Your scent is the strongest here. I can hear your breaths, your... air..." Tigress shuddered at Lokahviing speaking in this voice; Shifu, Po and Song were speechless. Lokahviing opened another room, and while it looked empty, a terrified exclamation came from it. Lokahviing reached in and grabbed someone, who began to choke as though he'd been seized by the throat. "Personal cloaking devices are rare outside military forces, but they are devastating tools... in the right hands, capable of bringing incredible destruction. But in the hands of a novice, it is a clumsy tool – you may be invisible, but the gauntlets do not hide your breathing nor do they cloak your smell!" Lokahviing gestured with his other hand, and the assailant appeared from thin air, held off his feet by his throat. The shopkeeper, fear forgotten, exclaimed,

"You again! I thought I made it clear I want nothing to do with you!"

Lokahviing's face contorted. "So, you have accosted this person before... Were it not for the presence of others, I would tear you limb from limb. But as I said to Chang when I first came here, I can be merciful."

The assailant's eyes went wide. "You're... the one they... call Lok... Lokahviing?" he coughed.

"Yes, I am Lokahviing – and these gauntlets... where did you get them?" Lokahviing asked, still speaking in that deep voice.

"A... vessel... from the... the... stars," the assailant gurgled out. "It... crashed... beyond the valley. North..."

Tigress was about to intercede when Lokahviing dropped the man, then took the gauntlets he was wearing. In his normal voice, he told him, "Leave this place... do not accost the shopkeeper here again, or you will find out firsthand how merciless a _dovah_ can be."

The assailant, confused but at the same time grateful he was still alive, got up and ran out the door. Lokahviing turned to the shopkeeper, and asked, "Are you alright?"

"I think so," the shopkeeper answered. She rose to full height. "I'm sorry you had to deal with that... Chen has always been problematic, but this was extreme."

"Extreme indeed," Lokahviing agreed, slipping the alien, black gauntlets over his own hands. "Military technology like this is not something to use lightly."

"May I ask how you know this?" the shopkeeper asked.

"Long story," Lokahviing replied. Looking about, he added, "You may want to double-check your inventory, make sure everything is here."

As the shopkeeper went about checking her inventory, Shifu approached Lokahviing. "Lokahviing... I don't know what this is, but I think you dropped it earlier this morning – I found it near your room." He handed Lokahviing a small, cracked blue crystal. Lokahviing chuckled, then handed it back to Shifu.

"Keep it... for now. When I have earned it, you will know what to do with it," Lokahviing responded, patting his crossguard lightsaber as he said this. Shifu examined the crystal briefly, then pocketed it.

While Lokahviing and Song went about looking through the clothes, and Po aided the shopkeeper in checking her inventory, Tigress mentally went over what she had seen in an effort to make sense of it. The voice Lokahviing spoke in when speaking to Chen – it was not his voice. Tigress was sure of it, even though she'd only known Lokahviing for barely a day. No, that was another part of him speaking – something...

It took only a moment for comprehension to dawn. Dragon. More than once, he said himself to be a dragon, if indirectly. Could it be that the deep, intimidating voice Lokahviing used be that of his dragon self? Tigress speculated that, if he had another voice, then either he had another personality, or he had another form, like a shape-shifter. A dragon form. The thought was both fascinating and terrifying to Tigress. A warrior who could shift between his normal and dragon forms. Such a creature could be a boon to the valley, a man who could save the valley...

… or destroy it, Tigress realized. Given what he had said before today, she was certain he was emotionally scarred – the state he was in when he told the Furious Fighters about what he saw at the Jedi Temple attested to that. He was traumatized in ways Tigress could only speculate. He-

"Tigress?" Lokahviing's voice said, grabbing her attention. "How do I look?" Tigress shook from her thoughts and saw Lokahviing was no longer dressed in that tattered wraith robe, but a simple brown tunic and pants.

Tigress smiled. "You look like one of us," She said.

"Do I?" Lokahviing asked. "I don't know – kinda makes me look... well, ordinary."

"And that makes for a dangerous warrior – who would suspect a man looking like you to be a deadly warrior packing three lightsabers?" Tigress complimented him. "You'd be able to pass among the citizenry without them recoiling in fear."

"What's a lightsaber?" the shopkeeper asked. Lokahviing didn't respond verbally, but merely reached into his tunic and retrieved his crossguard lightsaber and activated it, the violet blade and crossguard flaring to life.

"Not something easily defended against," Lokahviing said. He deactivated the lightsaber and tapped the gauntlets he got from Chen. "Beskar is one of the only minerals resistant to Lightsabers. And I know it isn't found here."

"Didn't Chen say something about a ship?" Po asked. "A crashed ship?"

"Yes, he did," Lokahviing said. "I can only see two scenarios – either one, the ship was carrying illegally-mined shipments of beskar or illegally-smuggled shipments of beskar armor..."

"... or two?" Shifu asked.

"... two, a Mandalorian ship crashed here, in which case, you have a serious problem," Lokahviing said solemnly. "However, I suspect it's the latter, as if Mandalorians had crashed here, I imagine you'd have heard something about it by now."

"Why is that?" Shifu inquired.

"Mandalorians are, by their very nature, a very militant and warlike race – they live to test themselves in the fires of combat," Lokahviing explained. "And they don't make a habit of being subtle when they do so. If they had crashed here, I imagine you would have seen signs of it – strange warriors clad in armor from head to toe, disappearing villagers and travelers, loss of contact with other areas..."

"Perhaps a Mandalorian ship crashed and none of them survived?" Tigress suggested. Lokahviing growled quietly and stroked his beard.

"Another possibility, but a very slim chance that happened – Mandalorians are known for their survivability, among other things," Lokahviing stated. "Regardless, if there is a ship out there, I want to investigate, and make sure no more technology like this..." he indicated his gauntlets. "... falls into the hands of mischievous criminals like Chen – or worse, an enemy to this valley."

"Though I hate to admit it, he has a point," Shifu sighed. "Gauntlets that can turn one invisible is bad enough. Who knows what else could fall into the wrong hands?"

"I'll go with Lokahviing," Tigress volunteered.

"You've got guts, Tigress, I'll give you that," Lokahviing stated. "I usually travel alone, but I may need help here. How soon can you be ready?"

"I'll go too," Po proclaimed. "Tigress is my friend."

"No, Po – I don't question your friendship with Tigress, but I will not risk anyone other than her in this until I know what we're dealing with," Lokahviing discounted. "If you want to help, keep your eyes, ears, and nose open for anything that seems out-of-place. When I return, we should have an idea of what we're dealing with here."

"He's right, Po," Shifu agreed. "I won't risk you in this, Dragon Warrior – won't send you blindly into the dark."

"But-" Po began to protest.

"No buts, Po," Song cut him off. "Not this time."

"How soon do we leave?" Tigress inquired.

"The sooner, the better," Lokahviing answered. "But keep your wits about you – whatever ship it is, there's no telling how much tech has been stolen already... or how many Mandalorian Commandos were on board, in the case of the latter scenario."

Lokahviing and Tigress left for the northern edge of the Valley at midday. It was a silent trip. When Tigress was sure they were out of earshot, she broke the silence. "Lokahviing... there's something I want to ask you," she said.

"And it's something you didn't want the others to hear, I gather," Lokahviing surmised.

"Yes," Tigress affirmed, "Something... between us." She paused, summoning her courage and gathering her thoughts before continuing, "The voice you spoke to Chen with... it wasn't your voice. Not your normal voice, at any rate. The others didn't seem to catch on, but I've had my suspicions since the first time you proclaimed yourself to be a dragon. You call yourself the Dragon Prince, and that voice you spoke in was something I've never heard before. All that said... are you a dragon?"

Lokahviing, instead of being offended, seemed amused. "You caught on faster than I thought you would. But yes, I am a Dragon. Well, Dragon- _shifter_ , specifically."

"Dragon-shifter?" Tigress repeated. "Meaning you can go between this form and your dragon form?"

"Perfect – you're two for two," Lokahviing chuckled. "Can you go further?"

Tigress paused in thought for a moment. "If I had to guess... I'd say that whatever powers you have stem from your dragon-shifter blood. Like your affinity with the Force, for instance."

"Keep going," Lokahviing stated.

"And I imagine your... dragon gift... is rare," Tigress guessed.

"Well, not so much rare as much as it is genetic," Lokahviing corrected her.

"Meaning that you have to be born with the gift," Tigress surmised. "Who passed yours to you?"

Lokahviing inhaled uncomfortably. "I wish I knew," he said. "I left my home world before I could find out where I got my dragon power from."

Tigress walked beside Lokahviing and put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she told him. "I know leaving must have been difficult for you. But I won't make you say anything about it before you're ready."

Lokahviing gently grasped Tigress' hand. "It was, perhaps, fortunate, that I left my home world when I did," he sighed. "Things were getting very heated. Very... tense."

"In what way?" Tigress asked.

"I was getting... exceedingly angry," Lokahviing replied. "At the people. Looking back, I feel I shouldn't have; the entire human race should not have been held responsible for the sins of only a few. But, at the time, I did – I blamed them for all of it."

"All of what?" Tigress queried.

"My troubles," Lokahviing clarified. "My arrogant younger brother... my mother... the inept staff of the schools I went to as a child... the children there that viewed it as a social heresy to be anything different than they... but most of all, for the tyrant who called himself my stepfather." He sighed again, his walking pace slowing, then added, "Had I stayed... I would have lashed out. Burned everything to the ground. I would have shown the humans of my home world what the fury of a _dovah_ looks like. It was after... after I saw a vision of a paradise, far from my home world... a place of healing and peace... that I chose to go on a self-imposed exile."

Tigress frowned in surprise. "You're an exile?" she asked. "Why did you never say so?"

"For two reasons," Lokahviing answered, "One: It was not your burden to bear, and neither was it any of your friends'; two, because my exile was self-imposed. Emphasis on self."

"So... you exiled yourself from your home world, both because you had a vision of a place where you'd be at peace, and to keep yourself from succumbing to rage and hate," Tigress deduced. "But... you said at the Jade Palace that twenty years into it, something happened. That you became Darth Taral twenty years after you left. Why?" Lokahviing was about to respond when he halted, shuddering and inhaling through clenched teeth. "What is it?" Tigress asked in concern.

"There... is a disturbance in the Force," he replied. Wordlessly, his pace quickened. Tigress ran to keep up, and before long, they came across the crashed ship. Suddenly, he dropped to the ground and jerked Tigress to the ground. "Get down!" he exclaimed quietly. He tapped his gauntlet's buttons, and a strange, transparent panel appeared above it. He tinkered with it, and a strange looking device appeared in his hands. He edged over the hill and looked through it at the crashed ship. "Hmm..." he mumbled. "That's a YT Model freighter. Usually used for cargo hauling, hence the name 'freighter'."

"I know what a freighter is," Tigress growled. "Any indication as to why it crashed?"

"It wasn't an accident, I can tell you that much," Lokahviing responded. He looked for a few moments longer, then handed the device to Tigress. "Look at the black marks on the hull."

Tigress examined the device, then looked through them, and was greeted by the sight of the crashed ship – much closer than it actually was. Tigress directed her gaze at the spine of the vessel, seeing multiple black spots that looked as though a concentrated fire had created them. "What am I looking at?" she asked.

"Those... are what brought the ship down. Those are type-four disruptor blasts," Lokahviing answered. "That freighter was attacked by a much larger vessel."

"In other words," Tigress surmised, "Someone shot it down."

"In a nutshell, yes," Lokahviing affirmed. He grabbed his crossguard lightsaber, and began making for the crashed ship. Tigress followed him, keeping alert for anything and everything. They reached the ship, cautiously boarding it. It was eerily-silent, aside from the occasional spark flare or contained fire. "Tigress, check the cockpit, see if the pilot is in there," Lokahviing instructed, indicating an adjacent hallway. "I'll check the cargo compartment." Tigress followed the hallway, where it branched off to the starboard side of the vessel, and followed that corridor to it's end, where the cockpit of the ship was situated. She stepped inside, and saw a bleeding man sitting in the pilot's chair with a strange knife in his chest adorned with a symbol Tigress was unfamiliar with. The man looked to be of the same race as Lokahviing, but absent of the dragon eyes.

"... know you're... there... hear you breathing," he said. Tigress' eyes went wide. The man was still alive!

"Lokahviing! Come here, quick!" she shouted. Lokahviing could be heard dashing to the cockpit, where he stopped at the sight of the injured man.

"Lokahviing..." the man coughed. "Is... that what he... calls himself? L... Lokahviing?" He managed a weak chuckle.

"John..." Lokahviing said in shock. "What happened? Where's your crew?"

"Crew?" John said weakly. "... No crew. Jumped ship... long ago. Didn't... didn't think I'd... need them. Ambush... ship I... never saw before... waiting in orb... orbit. Came down, took my cargo... but forgot to check the smuggling compartment. Special shipment... take it. You... make better use... of it... than... I..." John never finished his sentence as his life left him. Lokahviing sighed, reaching over and closing John's eyes. His hand fell upon the knife in John's chest, removing it.

"What kind of knife is that?" Tigress asked.

"It's a D'k tagh," Lokahviing answered. "A Klingon dagger. This symbol... it looks familiar, but I cannot place where I've seen it before."

"Didn't John say something about a special shipment in a hidden compartment?" Tigress inquired.

"Yeah... let's get it, then rig this ship," Lokahviing sighed. "Best funeral I can give old John, considering the circumstances." He turned and lead Tigress to the port side of the ship, where he used the Force to telekinetically lift off the lid to the hidden compartments; one was filled with several rifles and pistols Tigress had never seen before, the designs so alien to Tigress that she couldn't even begin to speculate how they functioned; the other contained a set of armor, black as night, but missing the gauntlets. Lokahviing leapt in, donned the armor, then fiddled with his gauntlets and the armor vanished. He then hopped into the other compartment and, through means spectacular and yet still completely foreign to Tigress, dematerialized all the weapons into the gauntlets. "Make for the Jade Palace – I'll set the ship's fuel cells to overload and catch up."

"How long will that take?" Tigress asked.

"Depends on how I overload it and what condition the cells are in," Lokahviing answered. "Get going, I'll be along shortly." Tigress did as requested, exiting the ship and heading back toward the valley. She'd gone no more than thirty paces away when Lokahviing caught up to her. "Keep walking," he told her. They both kept moving, even as Tigress heard the reverberating explosion as the freighter detonated like a giant bomb.

Tigress and Lokahviing were almost to the foot of the steps toward the Jade Palace when Tigress spoke for the first time since they left John to his funeral pyre: "John was your friend, wasn't he?"

" _Was_ being the key word in that sentence," Lokahviing replied. "He and I had a falling out after the massacre at the Jedi Temple. We hadn't spoken since... but even he didn't deserve to die like that."

"We still sent him out with a bang," Tigress assured him. "I'm sure he'd like it."

Lokahviing took out the knife that had been in John's chest. "I still don't understand what Klingons would want with whatever it was he was carrying. The computers indicated it was some low-stock cargo, nothing that would be of any interest to them."

"Could they have been after the equipment you took from the smuggling compartments?" Tigress suggested.

"Unlikely," Lokahviing discounted the theory. "The Klingon boarding party, according to the internal sensors and surveillance equipment, beamed in, killed John with this, took his cargo, and beamed out. They didn't even look for the smuggling compartments."

"Perhaps it was simple piracy," Tigress said.

"Could be," Lokahviing stated, examining the knife. "I'll analyze the symbol when we get back to the palace."

There was a long pause before Tigress changed the subject right as they reached the foot of the steps up to the Jade Palace. "Lokahviing... what happened to your home world that made you take the name Darth Taral?" Lokahviing and Tigress both stopped in their tracks, Lokahviing slowly turning around to face Tigress with a mixed look of melancholy and anger.

"Do you really think you can handle it? Do you think your friends could handle it?" he all but hissed his question.

"This is between us, I promise," Tigress assured Lokahviing. "I can-"

"No," Lokahviing cut her off. "Because if I tell you, my conscience won't rest until I tell your friends as well." There was an uncomfortable pause before he walked close to Tigress and whispered in her ear, "But if it's any consolation, you're on the right track – something did happen to my home world that caused me to take the name Darth Taral." Without another word, he walked away, beginning the long ascent up the steps to the Jade Palace...


	5. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Four

Chapter Four

It was well into the nighttime hours when Lokahviing and Tigress arrived at the courtyard of the Jade Palace. Shifu was already waiting for them. "I take it whatever was in the ship when it crashed was gone by the time you two arrived?" he asked.

"Some of it – not all," Lokahviing answered as he walked past Shifu heading for the dorms. He paused, looking over his shoulder at Shifu. "Has anyone been in my room since we've been gone?"

"Not to my knowledge, no," Shifu replied. "We don't ordinarily go into each others' rooms without good reason."

"Good," Lokahviing said as he resumed his walk to the dorms, leaving Tigress alone with Shifu. Shifu looked to Tigress and sighed.

"Again, with that walk."

"Well, he told me another piece of his shadowed past," Tigress told Shifu. She inhaled, and began to recount what she'd learned during the trip, starting with the talk of Lokahviing's gift, of how it was genetic, then the conversation of his exile, followed by the encounter with John on his ship, and culminating with the confirmation of part of Tigress' suspicions. Shifu toyed with his beard in thought.

"So... we know part of why he left... but we are still in the dark as to what happened twenty years later that compelled him to take on the title Darth Taral..." He looked Tigress in the eyes. "Speculate with me for a moment – what do you think happened?"

Tigress tossed the thought in her head for a bit before answering: "I think something happened to the world he once called home, something that enraged him beyond belief, caused him to lash out."

"And why do you say that?" Shifu inquired.

"You heard him when he told us of his title, Darth Taral – you heard what it translated to. Dark Marauder," Tigress explained. "I think he felt he'd calmed enough to return home, and came back to ash and dust where once his home sat. Something must have destroyed it, along with everyone he ever cared about."

"Something... or _someone_?" Shifu suggested.

"It may have been the latter, now that you suggest it," Tigress agreed. "He wouldn't have taken a title that translated to dark marauder unless he was hunting someone."

"Indeed," Shifu stated. "Hm... the further into his past we go, the more questions are raised. We know that he came here from his home world, and that he's seen things even I cannot imagine, and now we know he left his home world on a self-imposed exile to keep himself from lashing out in rage and hate at his kin who tormented him when he was young... which also brings up the question of how old exactly he is and why they hated and tormented him."

"It wasn't all of them – he did say that it was only a select few among his people," Tigress corrected him.

"Mm... and given his gifts, I imagine it was not other dragon-shifters he was among – no, it was this... human race," Shifu speculated. "Which raises the question of what exactly those few did to make Lokahviing hate them all as a whole so much."

"And we won't know those answers until he is ready to speak of them," Tigress concluded. A long pause followed the statement, before Shifu said to Tigress, "Get some rest, Tigress – you look tired."

Tigress paused, nodded, and headed for the dorms, went to her room, and closed the door. She heaved a sigh, sat down, and began meditating on what she'd learned...

The morning following the trip to the freighter was a Saturday, and everyone slept in. Early in the morning, Tigress heard a strange electronic sliding sound, then someone coming out of their room, but only dimly remembered it when she woke. She rose from bed, dressed, and headed to the dining area for breakfast, fully expecting Po and Song to be cooking.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Standing before a black cooking griddle Tigress was unfamiliar with was Lokahviing, flipping what looked to be breakfast cakes. "What's this?" Tigress asked.

"Pancakes," Po said. "He's cooking pancakes, is what he said."

Looking around the room, Tigress noticed a portable device that the griddle was attached to via a black cord, a bottle of a caramel-colored, thick, syrup, and around the table were plates laden with pancakes in various states of consumption.

"I had no idea you could cook, Lokahviing," Tigress said.

"Neither did they," Lokahviing chuckled.

"I think this is a prelude to something else," Song proclaimed as Tigress sat down. "A man doesn't go out of his way to do something like this for a group like ours unless he's trying to break the ice on a very sensitive subject – cushioning the blow, if you will."

Lokahviing heaved a sigh as he put the last of the pancakes on a plate and sat it before Tigress. "I was waiting for Tigress to arrive – in hopes that she would explain to you what I explained to her."

Tigress frowned in confusion before pouring the syrup on her pancakes. "What happened to the skepticism regarding whether or not we could handle it?"

"You got my conscience going," Lokahviing said. "In the short time I've known you, you've become someone I am beginning to trust, so much so that I am beginning to feel uncomfortable keeping the secret you touched up on during the trip to the crashed ship."

Tigress blinked a couple times, momentarily feeling pleased and scared she was having such an effect on him, downed a bite of her pancakes, then explained what she'd learned during the trip. When she finished, silence settled over the room.

"You're a... a dragon-shifter?" Mantis commented. "I thought your kind was mythical! Just legends and tales from far-away lands!"

"No... we are quite real," Lokahviing said. "And there are more of my kind than anyone knows. But that is another tale altogether – and not the tale I had intended to tell."

"And while I appreciate you being willing to explain them, I suspect that this particular tale will be a very dark tale," Shifu said from the doorway. "And I will not force you to tell it if you feel we cannot handle it."

"If I am to stay here... you all deserve to know," Lokahviing sighed, a single tear leaving his eye. "Who am I to judge you all unfit, unready, to hear the tales of my sins?"

"Everyone has sins, Lokahviing," Shifu said.

"But few have sins like mine," Lokahviing countered. He inhaled, then spoke, _"_ _... And when the dragon prince saw the ashes of what had once been his domain, he let loose a fury that shook the stars; the many worlds of his enemy burned and died, the darkness that consumed his home becoming a mere shadow of the power it once held – from the death of one world, came the deaths of many."_ He let the quote sink in before continuing on: "I was the social outcast among my community, before I went into exile; A dragon-shifter on a world of humans, while unique, often proves to be a source of friction. At first, most feared me. I was barely a child when I first took on my dragon form. Over time, my power developed, and my family did everything they could to hide it. It wasn't enough."

"It eventually was discovered," Shifu guessed.

"Discovered, yes – in a way not foreseen. They saw how... powerful I could be," Lokahviing affirmed. "I was still a child when that fight broke out. But even in my unpracticed state, I took on six larger boys and beat them all to the ground. Two went down with broken arms; one with a shattered hip; the other three were knocked unconscious when they were hurled into a wall."

"That's... not as bad as I was thinking it would be," Viper commented.

"That's not the whole story," Song said. "Is it?"

Lokahviing shook his head. "No," he responded. "It was after that incident that my mother divorced my father."

"That must have been difficult," Song said.

"Not as difficult as it would have been for other children; my father was more interested in his computer upgrades and games than he was in me," Lokahviing sighed. "Even so, later in life, his absence hit me harder than my brothers."

"Brothers?" Tigress repeated. "I thought you only had one brother – the arrogant one."

"I never said he was my only brother," Lokahviing corrected her. "There was the arrogant younger brother, Alex, and then the intelligent youngest brother, Sean. Alex was the problematic one, kept getting into trouble with the law, always going out of his way to make me look like a spineless inferior, and between my childhood anger problems and the issues with that bastard tyrant who called himself my stepfather, he was very successful."

"And your childhood peers went along with him," Shifu deduced.

"Yes," Lokahviing growled, his hand slowly clenching. "My brother spread horrid rumors he was ordered to keep to himself, to enhance his social look with his band of juvenile delinquents. My stepfather took advantage of my anger issues, my gullibility, and my tendency to mimic others and made me out to be something I'm not. Never once was I asked for my side of the story, the society I grew up in just took him at his word. As I got older, I came to hate humans more and more. By the time I blew the cover off my stepfather's affair with another woman while he was married to my mother, it was far too late – his lies had spread beyond my ability to reverse them. And even after exposing him as the lying, unfaithful traitor he was, my mother still fought to preserve his lies."

"That's... that's terrible!" Viper exclaimed softly.

"It gets worse," Lokahviing continued. "After my mom divorced my stepfather, she became the tyrant he had been. And for ten years, I was tormented by the fact that I had been pulled out of one hell and put in another."

"At what point did your mother deny you what you felt you earned after all that?" Tigress asked.

"Three years before I left my home world," Lokahviing answered. "After that, I had grown to hate the entire human race for what had happened to me. I wanted..." he paused, fighting back tears. "... I wanted them to die. I wanted them all to suffer, to flee in terror at the wrath they would have provoked had I stayed there." He looked at the others, tears welling up in his eyes. "Do you know what that's like? To... hate your own kin so much, you want them all to die for the sins of a few? Do you know what that kind of anger can do to you?"

"I can't... imagine... what that kind of anger feels like," Shifu said. "I can see why you left, then. But how? How did you leave?"

"After Alex got married and went on with the life he stole from me, I found I could... create things... with my mind. I spent a week, feeding on the power of my dragon blood, drawing sustenance from the Force, and building my carrier ship," Lokahviing answered. "Once it was built, I left. Never even told the few friends I had goodbye. Just upped and left."

"While this is a sad story... those aren't sins," Song said.

"No... but what I did when I returned twenty years later... _that_ was a sin. A grave sin that has haunted me for nearly three hundred years," Lokahviing said, eliciting shocked gasps from everyone.

"You're three hundred years old?" Po asked. "You don't look a day over twenty!"

"Three hundred twenty-nine, specifically," Lokahviing said. "I found, during my exile, that I had a... condition. A very rare condition in dragon-shifters, as it was explained to me, in which my physical aging completely halted after a certain point. And it is a gift that is both genetic... and transferable via chemical concoction."

"You... you're immortal!" Song gasped.

"Yes... but looking back at everything I've been through in the last three hundred years... I still ask if my immortality is truly worth it," Lokahviing sighed.

"What happened, then?" Tigress asked, placing a hand over his fist. "What made you take the title of Darth Taral?"

"Twenty years after I left... I came back. I felt I had mellowed, calmed, enough to return home. That the fallout from my distant past would have settled," Lokahviing said, his voice shaking. Tears began to stream down his cheeks. "I was wrong. In my absence, an alien faction only calling themselves the Vasari... glassed... my home world. Burned everything to the ground. My home... my family... my friends... I could... feel the pain of what took place, hear the screams of the dead as they cried out in terror while the world around them burned... I... I went..." Lokahviing could keep composed no longer, as he buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

Tigress sat next to Lokahviing and let him lean on her. "You lashed out at them, hating them for what they did to your home. You did to them what they did to you. You destroyed their worlds so that they would know your pain."

"Compelled them to flee in terror at the wrath of the _dovah_ they provoked," Lokahviing sobbed. "At the threat they never saw, as I never left survivors. I became, in their words, a faceless demon that marched to their doom. I destroyed their fleets, laid low their best warriors, drove them mad with fear as I waged a vengeful war of hatred and rage against them, until they took what was left of their civilization and just kept running for fear of me exterminating them. Last I heard, they still fled in terror, stopping at certain worlds only long enough to replenish their resources so they could move on." Silence settled over the room, the only sound being that of Lokahviing crying. Tigress gripped him with a gentle sympathy.

"Lokahviing... I'm so sorry. I had no idea..."

"... that I was a mass-murderer? That I was guilty of genocide?" Lokahviing sobbed in anger, looking into Tigress' eyes as his changed color to red.

Tigress remained calm as she shook her head. "No, you're not a mass-murderer, nor did any of us label you as one. Were I in your position, I do not think I would have done any differently. You were in pain back then – terrible pain. You lashed out at those that destroyed everyone and everything you ever cared about. Truthfully, after hearing all that... I don't blame you."

"If you hated them so much, why did you stop destroying them?" Song asked.

"Because I could no longer find them," Lokahviing replied. "I could no longer get to them before they vanished; they dropped beacons at every world they stopped at, warning beacons. That's how I tracked them. But they eventually got ahead, and I could no longer keep up with them as they ran. And at that point, most of my rage had diminished, and the magnitude of what I had done began to sink in... so I left. Fled that galaxy, wandered until I happened across the world I learned was called Nirn... where I met Paarthurnax. He... he showed me the first sympathy I had ever known since I left Earth. He-"

Tigress silenced Lokahviing by putting her hand on his lips. "Say no more," she told him. "You've said enough already."

Silence again settled over the room as this all was taken in. They knew the story of Darth Taral, of the sins he committed. Shifu was the first to speak up. "I'm glad you saw fit to come clean with us on this... but many questions remain unanswered. However, I agree with Tigress in that you have said enough today. And I am sorry you have had to deal with this pain. I don't know what it's like, but I know you can take comfort in Tigress – she knows your pain better than anyone else. She's had troubles similar to yours, if much less severe."

Tigress was quick to support this. "If ever you want to talk, Lokahviing, you can always talk to me. I care about you – no one deserves to suffer as you have." Lokahviing didn't verbally respond – just hugged Tigress, who hugged him back. "You're not alone, Lokahviing," she whispered in his ear. The others present just stared wordlessly at Tigress and Lokahviing.

Shifu smiled mentally. This was, perhaps, the start of what could become something great for the both of them. Tigress was willing, Lokahviing was beginning to trust her... now all that remained was to piece together the tragic tale of the immortal Dragon Prince...

… one story at a time...


	6. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Under normal circumstances, the day would have been spent pursuing weekend activities and generally relaxing. But not this Saturday. Having heard the sad tale of how Lokahviing came to take the title Darth Taral, they all were in the dining area, discussing what they'd learned.

"... surprised at how calm you all are after learning of such a crime," Po commented. "He admitted to killing off a race!"

"He didn't kill them all, Po," Shifu corrected him. "He killed only enough of them to convince them that they couldn't kill him."

"Come on, Shifu! You heard what he said! If he'd been able to catch them, he'd have killed all of them!" Po protested.

"But he stopped, Po," Viper said. "And came to regret it. You saw him crying – we all did. A man who does not regret such a thing wouldn't cry over it. It's only a very cold heart that does not have regrets."

"And he's had three hundred years to atone for it. And he's been through many things since," Tigress stated. "I cannot, will not, and won't allow any of you to hold this against him."

"Honestly, Tigress, I think the only person who does is Po," Mantis commented.

"Damn right, I do!" Po exclaimed. "How do we know he's atoned for what he did? How can we be sure he won't suddenly turn on us?"

"That's enough, Po!" yelled Song, who had been silent until now. Po recoiled, surprised at his girlfriend's sudden anger. "Was I not guilty of sins of my own when I came here? Did I not have past crimes? Did I not have to earn your friends' trust? Did I not have to win your heart? I came here to walk the path of redemption because of the man you now want banished based on a three-hundred-year-old sin that was not entirely his fault! How can you stand there and tell me you want him gone when we are the closest thing to family he has left?!" Po remained silent, shrunk back in fear. "We may not have the entire story," Song continued calmly, "But we know enough to know that he needs us, even though he may not say it. He could have kept that story to himself, but he didn't. He told us. He wanted us to understand. He trusts us. If we banish him now, based on what he did long ago, what does that make us?"

"She's right," Crane chimed in. "He's one of us now."

"And we don't turn on each other," Monkey agreed. "No matter what we did in the past."

Po sat back up. "So what do we do?" he asked.

"We show him what so few ever did – that we are here for him. That we care. That we want him here," Shifu replied. "That he belongs here."

"Uh... does anyone else hear that?" Po asked. Everyone was quiet, and they heard it – the rumbling, thrumming breathing of a dragon. The breathing grew quiet as subtle footsteps could be heard walking away from the dining area.

"He was listening to us!" Viper whispered.

"Lokahviing, wait!" Tigress called out, dashing out to catch him. Lokahviing was a blur, moving outside. Tigress ran to follow, and caught him in the courtyard. "Lokahviing, Po doesn't speak for all of us!" Lokahviing never turned to face them, nor made any kind of response. Tigress walked closer to him. "Po is a bit sensitive, but he doesn't speak for us all. He is just-"

"It wasn't Po I was running from, nor any of you," Lokahviing interrupted. "The intent was to draw you all out here."

"Draw us out here?" Po asked. "What for?"

"If you truly want me here, you have to see it," Lokahviing said.

"We have to see what?" Viper asked, confused and worried.

Lokahviing didn't verbally respond, but flames appeared across his body, making Tigress jump back in shock. "Lokahviing! Stop!" she shouted. But it had no effect. The flames consumed his body, and just as it seemed Lokahviing would become ash, his power exploded outward, causing everyone to recoil. When they recovered, Lokahviing wasn't there, and in his place was a massive, crimson-scaled winged beast.

A dragon.

The dragon turned to face them, and when Tigress saw his eyes, she was astonished beyond belief. This was Lokahviing – in his dragon form. "Lokahviing...?" Tigress asked.

"Yes," Lokahviing answered. "This is my dragon form. This is where my power stems from. This is why those kin I grew up with feared and hated me." He lowered his head to Tigress' level. "Can you honestly tell me you are not afraid of this?"

Tigress didn't verbally respond immediately, merely stroked Lokahviing's cheek for a moment. "I know what you're doing, Lokahviing," she told him. "You're testing me. You're trying to see if you can trust me. I harbor no ill will against you – none of us do. I won't force you to trust me – but I will be here for you when you need me. I don't presume to judge you. I don't fear or despise you for what you are or what you've done – I've been down that road once. I know what it's like to be feared and hated for what you are. I know what rage and anger feels like. I was an orphan from day one. I never knew my parents. And like you, I had anger issues. The kids of the orphanage were afraid of me, afraid of setting me off." Lokahviing let loose a trembling exhale. Tigress embraced his dragon head. "Shh-sh, easy, Lokahviing... I'm just trying to show you how alike we are. I mean not to put you through the pain of your troubled past." She looked Lokahviing in his eyes. "I will always be here for you, Lokahviing. Always. You are the first person I've met who has suffered as I have. If ever you need something, don't be afraid to turn to me." She gave him a gentle kiss on the snout.

Lokahviing sighed. "You know me so little, yet you comfort me in such a way." He looked up at Tigress. "I wish I'd met you many years ago."

"I wish I'd met you long ago, as well. You're a good person, Lokahviing. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise," Tigress assured him. In a flash, Lokahviing shifted back to his normal form, standing before Tigress. He walked over, hugging Tigress, then whispering in her ear,

"You and your friends should come to my room later tonight – I should have the symbol on the dagger analyzed and John's computer files decrypted by then." After that, he headed off to his room.

"What'd he say?" Po asked.

"For us to come by his room later tonight – he'll be decrypting the computer files he lifted from John's ship and analyzing the symbol on the dagger," Tigress responded. "Even so... be careful what you say around him, Po – I don't know if you've gleaned it yet, but he's..."

"... Sensitive," Shifu finished. "So we should _all_ be careful. We don't want to drive him away."

Later that night, as requested, the Furious Fighters all headed to Lokahviing's room. When they opened the door, they were greeted by the sight of a red-lit room. Tigress frowned in confusion.

"This isn't how Lokahviing's room was before..." Po commented. "Did he leave and not tell us?"

"No," Tigress stated, "Or this room would look no different than it did when he first arrived." Tigress approached the door on the other side of the room, and when she got near it, she leapt in surprise as the door sensed her presence, and slid open vertically. The sound... Tigress realized she had heard that same sound this morning. What lie beyond the door was both alien and spectacular to Tigress – carpeted floors, metallic walls adorned with shelves and various decorations, support pillars adorned with even more decorations... Lokahviing's room looked more like a domicile now. The group entered the domicile, and noticed a window off to the left that was covered by blinds. The room beyond was alive with the sound of rapid tapping.

"Lokahviing?" Tigress called out.

"In here," Lokahviing said from within the room. The group followed the window and wall to the end, where the domicile branched off to a medical station, and just shy of it was a door. As before, the door sensed the presence of the others and slid open. Lokahviing sat before that computer terminal, tapping a key and causing a window on the computer screen to vanish.

"You said to come by here later, so here we are," Po spoke before Tigress could. "And, for what it's worth... I'm sorry for..."

Lokahviing waved his hand dismissively. "Don't worry about it, Po – we all make mistakes."

"Any luck with the computer files?" Tigress asked as she entered the room. Inside were the amenities of a master bedroom, along with decorations of a more personal nature.

"Nope," Lokahviing responded with a shake of his head. "They just confirmed he was hauling some low stock freight, and that, for one reason or another, his crew jumped ship. Beyond that, nothing suspicious. However, there was a compressed file with some heavy encryption – still breaking the encryption on that."

"How heavy?" Tigress asked.

"That's even scarier – it's military-grade," Lokahviing replied. "John wouldn't use that unless it was something he came across that was life-threatening."

"Any danger to us?" Shifu asked.

"I won't know 'till I get into that file, and that'll take a while – been a long time since I last broke encryption like that," Lokahviing answered.

"What about the symbol on the dagger?" Song inquired.

"Even more scarier," Lokahviing replied, taking the dagger and tossing it to her. "That D'k tagh is adorned with the symbol of the Klingon House of Torg."

"Who?" Po asked as Song examined the weapon.

"One of the great houses of the Klingon Empire," Lokahviing explained. "They were originally poised to take one of the seats on the Klingon High Council before an agent working with the House of Martok uncovered their collusion with the Romulan Star Empire and the Tal Shiar. They were tried before the Council for Treason, convicted, and banished from Qo'nos."

"So how does that affect us?" Monkey queried.

"No idea," Lokahviing answered. "But if the House of Torg had anything against you, I imagine we'd be hearing about it by now."

"So why would they kill John and take his cargo?" Tigress asked.

"Why, indeed," Lokahviing sighed. "Under normal circumstances, you could just chalk it up to their need of supplies, but that's a long shot. I can only speculate, but I suspect that John came across something they didn't want known."

"You sound like you've had run-ins with them before," Shifu commented.

"Not the House of Torg, no," Lokahviing stated. "But their _cousins_ – and I use that term very loosely – in the House of Duras, convicted of the same crime Torg was – colluding with the Tal Shiar."

"Who are the Tal Shiar, anyway?" Mantis interjected.

"Clandestine branch of the Romulan Star Empire – well-known for their lying, cloak-and-dagger operations, operating behind the scenes and often behind enemy lines, within various governments, and experimenting with things they shouldn't. It was shit like that that caused the Hobus Disaster," Lokahviing said. His eyes betrayed a look of Melancholy.

"Did you witness that event?" Tigress asked.

"Witness it?" Lokahviing scoffed. "If I had, we wouldn't be talking right now. No, I barely got off Romulus in time to _avoid_ it."

"What happened during the Hobus Disaster?" Po asked.

"A supernova with a long story – best told another time," Lokahviing stated.

"Returning to the original subject," Song said, "Is there any reason to believe the Klingons will come for this?"

"Basically? No. If there were any cause for concern, we'd be hearing about it by now. And if the Klingons had anything against us, they'd either invade or just torpedo us from orbit and be done with it," Lokahviing answered.

"So what now?" Viper inquired.

"Now... I guess we just go back to business as usual," Lokahviing sighed with a shrug. There was an uncomfortable pause before Shifu asked,

"Lokahviing... how... how did you come to be called _fal dovah kulaan_?"

"As I said before," Lokahviing explained, "It was the name Paarthurnax gave me. I met him after I halted my... vengeful crusade, against the Vasari. I landed on his world – Nirn – as a broken man. I wandered, and searched for a way to... die."

"You wanted to die?" Viper inquired. "Why?"

"I felt it was what I deserved," Lokahviing answered. "I climbed the highest mountain there was – the Throat of the World, in Skyrim. I climbed that mountain to it's very peak... and that's where I met Paarthurnax. Even aged, he could sense and see my power, my gifts... my curses. He started the conversation, and got me to tell the story of my sad past to that point... he sympathized. He understood. Showed me the first true kindness I had known since I left my home world. He understood what drove me to take the name Darth Taral. Then he taught me the ways of the Thu'um, eventually calling me _Fal Dovah Kulaan_... the dragon prince. Said I was the pride of dragons everywhere, on Nirn and elsewhere. From that moment on, I would command and receive respect from all dragons."

"How could he know?" Shifu queried.

"I don't know – but he was right. After I left Nirn, having recovered from my ordeal, I met a dragon people – warriors who lived, fought, and died side-by-side with dragons. And the dragons hailed me as the Dragon Prince," Lokahviing continued.

"When did you leave Nirn?" Shifu asked.

"And why?" Added Monkey.

"Dovahkiin," Lokahviing said. "Dovahkiin is why. Many stories began to make their way across Skyrim about such a warrior. When I told Paarthurnax... he went pale. Told me that I had to get off-world before he or someone worse found me. I wanted to defend him... but he would not allow it. So I left... I never saw him again. And, again, some years after I left, I met the Dragonarians."

"What made you leave them?" Tigress asked.

"I felt something... calling out to me," Lokahviing responded. "Something drew me away. As much as I felt... at peace... with them, I felt that there was something in the galaxy I had to find... I could feel it calling out to me."

"Did you ever find it?" Tigress asked.

"No," Lokahviing sighed with the shake of his head. "The search drew me here. After that..."

"After that... what?" Tigress queried, her curiosity piqued.

"I think I know what it is that drew me here – I felt it first when Oogway sent me here, and again, when... I..."

Something seemed off. Tigress could sense Lokahviing was holding back. Before Tigress could press in, Po intervened. "At what point did you arrive at the Jedi Temple?"

"Some years after the end of the Marauder War," Lokahviing sighed.

"Wait a second – you fought in a war?!" Po exclaimed. "Why didn't you say so?!"

"Do you speak of all your battles?" Lokahviing countered. "Or are there some you'd rather forget?"

"What was the Marauder War?" Shifu asked.

"The war that defined Dragon-Shifters everywhere," Lokahviing stated solemnly. "The Necromyan collective came after the dragon-shifters with blades and guns ready... and we retaliated. Long story short, there were elements in the shadows that manipulated the war. We learned of it, and set out to stop it. And we succeeded. I fought in several crucial battles of the Marauder War, including the final battle on that world where we broadcast the Necromyans' defeat. After that, I was discharged."

"Discharged?" Po asked. "What does that mean?"

"Honorably discharged – means the military faction I served – the Marauder Corps – felt I had served long enough, and with honor, and released me from their service. After that, I collected my effects, returned to my ship, and went back to the life I longed to return to at that time – the life of a wanderer. And for many years, I wandered the stars, until I came across Coruscant, was sought out by the Jedi, and brought to the Jedi Temple."

"Well, save that story for another time," Shifu suggested. Lokahviing shrugged. Shifu paused before speaking again: "Lokahviing... when you demonstrated your combat prowess to us, you said you used the Force to create illusion opponents, said you use them for training purposes. Could you do that for us?"

"I... could," Lokahviing answered. "But it'd still be dangerous – the illusions could do very real harm, and could potentially kill you or your students."

"I know – is there any way to do that that does not present such a lethal danger?" Shifu asked.

Lokahviing shook his head. "Not with the Force, no, but..."

"... But...?" Tigress said, picking up on what Lokahviing implied.

"I do have technologies that could do something generally the same, but absent of the potentially-lethal possibilities," Lokahviing stated. "Hologram technology has been standard issue for both training and general recreational purposes. Picked up a few portable modules before my last run-in with the House of Duras."

"Could one of those modules encompass the training room?" Shifu asked.

"Yeah!" Lokahviing answered as though it were a foregone conclusion. "I can have it installed within the hour, but for the thing to boot up and initialize... two, maybe three hours, tops."

"In that case, please – by all means," Shifu responded with a gesture. Lokahviing rose from his seat.

"Tigress, might need you on this one – extra set of hands are always handy when installing this stuff."

Tigress wordlessly followed Lokahviing while the others looked around Lokahviing's domicile. She followed him to a downstairs area, into a storage room. He proceeded inside, grumbling, "Now where did I leave the damn thing...?"

Tigress looked around, but her mind drifted to something else: "Lokahviing... how did you turn the room we gave you to this... place?"

"My domicile," Lokahviing corrected her. "Yeah, same technology that was in use in the Trader Fleets in one of the universes I visited can also be used to do this, when combined with the Hologram technology I mentioned earlier. And with the program I made for it... I can turn any room in to a domicile."

"What kind of technology?" Tigress asked.

"Not sure how to explain it, other than the fact it makes enclosed spaces much larger, depending on how it's configured," Lokahviing answered.

"How long were you among the Trader Fleets?" Tigress asked, her eyes spotting a strange, boxy device sitting with several others of the same kind.

"Only a couple months, until I heard rumors of an alien invasion. I was not eager to get dragged into another war, so I left," Lokahviing replied. "A random computer error landed me in the lap of the Jiralhanae, and then, subsequently, the Sangheili. The latter were far more cordial than the former."

"How so?" Tigress asked.

"Well, to put it bluntly, the Jiralhanae boarded my ship and nearly killed me – the Sangheili found me adrift near their home world and took me in, nursed me back to health," Lokahviing said. "And their leader – warrior by the name of Thel 'Vadam – was... the first to hear the stories of all my travels to that point. More and more, he was impressed by what he called my resilience. And I had a chance to prove it to him, when the Covenant Remnant attacked Sangheilios. I single-handedly brought down a Covenant ship, sank it in the sea. Thel... was the first to see me provoked into a rage, though even he hasn't seen it at it's darkest. Still, he never again questioned my ability, nor my allegiance. I think he knew that had I wanted to harm him, or his family, his people, or his home, I would have done so."

"And the Sangheili gave you a home among them," Tigress surmised. "What compelled you to leave them?"

"Same thing that compelled me when I was living among the Dragonarians – that something that called out to me, that I had to find. On Sangheilios... I fought it for thirty years. But after that... I had to find it, more than ever. Thel wished me luck, and bid me contact him when I found whatever it was I was looking for. We've maintained contact ever since. In any event, it was after I left Sangheilios that I ended up here."

Tigress resisted the urge to ask what it was he felt calling to him, and what it was that compelled him to stay here, by changing the subject. "Are these what you're looking for?" She asked, indicating the boxy devices. Lokahviing looked up, confused, and eventually spotted the devices.

"Ah! Yes, those." He walked over and picked one up, and he and Tigress walked out of the storage room and back into the domicile, where the others were no longer present. Lokahviing and Tigress proceeded to the training room, and went about installing the device in the ceiling...


	7. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Weeks rolled by without incident after Lokahviing installed the holographic projector in the training room, and hooking it up to a solar array for power. Training became much more challenging, but absent of the lethality Lokahviing used in his training. The furious fighters, and Shifu, were all impressed with how challenging the holographic simulations could be. More than once, they had to re-do a simulation because of an error or slip-up on the part of one of the members. Moreover, it brought them closer together as a team. During this time, nary an inquiry was made into Lokahviing's past, still shrouded in mystery and pain.

Tigress, as Po, wanted to continue piecing together the story of the immortal Dragon Prince. So, one evening, Tigress spoke up: "Lokahviing... would this be a good time to speak of your past?"

"Well, I'd say it's a bit overdue, considering it's been six weeks since I last spoke of it; what did you want to know?" Lokahviing asked.

Tigress paused to consider her choices. They all knew Lokahviing left his home world on a self-imposed exile to keep himself from succumbing to rage, hate and despair, during which he learned of his immortality; he returned twenty years later to learn that his home had been desolated by the Vasari, after which, he took on the title Darth Taral and went on a mad crusade of vengeance, driving the Vasari mad with fear and forcing them to flee in terror at the wrath they provoked; after his rage diminished, Lokahviing left Vasari space to find a world to die on, where he met Paarthurnax, who named him Lokahviing and bequeathed to him the title of _Fal Dovah Kulaan_ , and when Lokahviing learned of the rise of Dovahkiin, and was sent to safety among the stars by Paarthurnax himself; however long it was, Lokahviing then met the Dragonarians, and subsequently, other dragon-shifters, and joined the Marauder Corps when they waged what he called the Marauder War, after which, he was discharged, gathered his effects, and returned to his life as a wanderer, where he eventually came across a world named Coruscant, where he was sought out by the Jedi Order, taken in, evidently trained to some degree – though what exact degree remained unclear – and remained among them until the event Lokahviing described as Order Sixty-Six, where he witnessed the massacre of every Jedi at the Jedi Temple, barely escaping with his life; from there, however, Tigress knew he eventually stayed on a world he called Circinius IV, that he spent time among a Trader Fleet, where he learned how to combine their technology with the Holographic technology he picked up elsewhere before his run-ins with the House of Duras, and that he was nearly killed by the Jiralhanae, then subsequently found by and befriended the Sangheili, living among them for thirty years before coming to the world Tigress resided on. It seemed clear where next to continue the story.

After gathering her thoughts, Tigress spoke, "After you escaped the Jedi Temple... where did you go?"

Lokahviing nodded, downing a bite of his meal. "Well, as you can imagine, I no longer felt safe in that universe. I had to get out of there, and fast. After linking up with my carrier ship – which was hiding cloaked out-system – I headed to one of the several universes where humans resided. I no longer remember which one it was, but this particular 'verse was ruled by a united faction of humans known as the United Nations Space Command, or the UNSC."

"I can't imagine you were happy there, considering what humans had done to you so many years before," Viper commented.

"Not true, Viper," Lokahviing responded. "At that point, my hatred of humans as a whole had completely dissipated. If anything, I was relieved to be among the humans of the UNSC, because many of my Jedi colleagues – not to mention my friends outside the temple – were human."

"How did you get them to accept you among them?" Po asked.

"Funny you should ask that," Lokahviing said. "I told them the truth as I saw it – I was a refugee fleeing from a coup. They thought I was running from a massive Innie attack."

"What's an Innie? Some kind of alien?" Song inquired.

"I asked myself that for a year and a half, until I looked it up on the UNSC interstellar networks – Innie was just a common nickname the UNSC gave to the human rebels that they called the Insurrectionists. They had various sub-factions – Venizian movement, United Rebel Front, blah, blah, blah – point is, they were rebels against the UNSC for god-only-knows-what reasons," Lokahviing explained. "Anyway, after having a few run-ins with them in the outer UNSC colonies, I decided to move inward, where I came across Circinius IV."

"So, Circinius IV was a UNSC Colony?" Po asked. "Did the Innies have any presence there?"

"No... but my stay there was, to be blunt, short-lived," Lokahviing replied. "The UNSC was to be embroiled in a war for their very survival against a real horde – and not the Innies."

"Who?" Tigress queried.

"An alien collective known only as the Covenant," Lokahviing responded. "Of course, I had heard rumors – loss of contact with the outer colonies, one by one, speculations that the Office of Naval Intelligence was hiding something – and with good reason, as I found out – but I never paid much heed to all that in my stay on Circinius IV. Until the Covenant came knocking. Smashed the orbital fleet, launched a surface invasion, and massacred every last human they could find." Lokahviing paused, visibly shuddering. "It... reminded me of Order Sixty-Six, only it wasn't Clone Troops I was facing down, but alien warriors much larger than me. Back then, I learned, the Sangheili were a part of the Covenant. They lead the attack on Circinius IV, and I only was able to kill a select few. My kill-count there consisted primarily of Unggoy and Kig-Yar. The Sangheili... used energy shields in their armor that deflected my weapons, even my lightsabers."

"Did you tell this to Thel?" Tigress asked.

"Eventually, yes – and it wasn't easy for me. But when Thel heard the tale, he expressed his apologies, said that he was ashamed that the Sangheili had taken part of such genocide," Lokahviing answered.

"Who is Thel?" Monkey asked.

"Thel 'Vadam – the current Kaidon of the Sangheili... and a good friend," Lokahviing replied. "But that's another tale for another time."

"Shifting back to Circinius IV," Shifu said officiously, "did you ever learn of any survivors to that massacre, other than yourself?"

"Not immediately, no," Lokahviing stated. "I didn't learn of any survivors until after I told this tale to Thel. As he told it, there were three survivors, found in the military academy on that world – Senior Cadet April Orenski, Freshman Cadet Michael Sullivan... and Freshman Cadet... Thomas Lasky."

"You say that name like we should know it," Mantis commented.

"No," Song discounted. "His tone implies he knew him."

"I did – I met him, eight years into my stay among the Sangheili," Lokahviing affirmed. "Commander Lasky was there visiting Sangheilios to deliver a diplomatic party. Lasky singled me out, recognizing me from Circinius IV, which I had no idea he had seen me, as I had never spoken with him there. He and I talked for a good long while. He is... among the closest human friends I ever had."

"What happened to him?" Tigress asked softly.

"To my knowledge, he died of natural causes," Lokahviing sighed.

"What of Thel?" Song inquired. "How old is he?"

Lokahviing scoffed. "Thel was my test subject for my chemical concoction, the one that could bestow my immortality on others; he is as ageless as I."

"Getting back on-topic," Shifu said, "How did you escape Circinius IV?"

"Right," Lokahviing sighed. "The events on Coruscant taught me the value of having an escape plan – I had my carrier ship hidden out-system, and my starfighter was kept away from the population center, to avoid it being targeted by an orbital strike. Good thing, too – I hid it in the surrounding forest, and when the Covenant came knocking, they targeted the population center, destroyed everything that could allow the people to escape. Anyway, as soon as I could, I punched a hole in the Covenant lines and high-tailed it out of there."

"Did you try and look for survivors?" Po asked.

"Yeah, but everyone I found was either dying or died as they tried to make a break for it. I tried to come back under cloak with my carrier ship, but by the time I arrived, the Covenant had burnt that world to a cinder," Lokahviing answered. "After that, I began hearing more and more of the Covenant's predations, decided my ship would make no difference in that war, and made for friendlier turf, which is when I crossed 'verses yet again and came into contact with the United Federation of Planets and their allies in the Klingon Empire."

"How did they greet you?" Tigress asked.

"Well, when I crossed over, I ended up orbiting the Klingon home world, Qo'nos. There were both Federation and Klingon ships present, along with a few from the Romulan Republic," Lokahviing replied.

"Romulan _Republic_?" Song repeated. "Not the Romulan _Star Empire_?"

"No, the Republic – the good, honorable Romulans," Lokahviing clarified.

"How did they react to your sudden arrival?" Shifu inquired.

"Well, the Federation and Romulan ships were cordial enough – the Feds more than the Romulans, as the Romulans went shields-up the second I arrived; the Federation ships stayed the Klingons' ships from attacking me; the Klingon ships went red alert, shields-up, and weapons-hot when I appeared," Lokahviing said.

"Why?" Viper queried. "Are they always so jumpy?"

"No, they mistook my ship for one of the ships from the house of Torg," Lokahviing said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "It was an advanced-model version of the Bird-of-Prey popular among the Klingon fleet."

"Do you still have it?" Tigress asked.

"Yes," Lokahviing sighed. "And as I indicated before, it is hidden."

"And I'm sure you have good reason to keep it hidden, so no one ask about it," Shifu said sternly. There was a long pause while everyone ate as they contemplated what was said so far. It remained that way until Tigress broke the silence by saying,

"How long were you in that 'verse? And what compelled you to leave?"

"I no longer remember how long I was there – at that point, the years were starting to blur together. I left because, as it had been with the Dragonarians and the Sangheili, I felt something calling out to me. I felt it... oh, I want to say, a week? No, two weeks, after I acquired that holographic emitter from a Ferengi merchant. Not long after I left, I heard he was arrested for selling Federation technology to the Romulan Star Empire," Lokahviing elaborated. "Anyway, from there, I was drawn to Trader space."

"Yeah, about that – who were the Trader fleets?" Tigress asked.

"Another society of Humans, but less... violent, if you can believe it. They set a record for me, being a faction of humans who had gone for a thousand years without waging war on one another," Lokahviing stated.

"And it was from their fleets that you gained a key piece of technology that allowed you to develop whatever you used to turn the room we gave you into your own domicile," Tigress surmised.

"Yes, it was originally used in their trade ships and freighters," Lokahviing said.

"And you told me you left that 'verse because of a war that broke out," Tigress continued. "If I may... who was it against?"

Lokahviing's face betrayed a look of melancholy. "You know who they are – I've told you of them before. They fled from a terror they could not defeat, a faceless assailant marching inexorably to their doom."

Tigress' jaw slowly lowered as comprehension dawned. "The Vasari...?" she whispered. Lokahviing slowly nodded.

"Somehow, I got ahead of them. Somehow, I was in the wrong place at the right time, and for once, I was able to save a world from a terrifying alien attack. But after that, I left."

"You wanted no part in yet another war," Tigress deduced, "Let alone to face the Vasari again."

"I was tempted to finish what I started," Lokahviing whispered hoarsely. "But to do so, I would have to become that monster again. I was burned by that fire before – I was not going to be burned by it again. I knew, if I started down the path of vengeance again, I would not stop until I had completely annihilated the Vasari, and I would become... something even a dragon-shifter hates." Lokahviing's eyes closed as his head sank. Tigress gently put a hand on his shoulder and rubbed it.

"You did the wise thing," she assured him.

"Perhaps..." Lokahviing whispered.

"No 'perhaps' about it," Shifu reinforced Tigress' statement. "You were tempted to walk the path of vengeance again, and you turned away from it."

"Ran from it," Lokahviing corrected him.

"It doesn't matter – had you stayed and fought, you would have been corrupted," Shifu replied. "And we would never have met you."

Lokahviing heaved a sigh. "I suppose you're right... Regardless-"

Tigress silenced Lokahviing gently. "Save what happened next for another time," she said softly. Lokahviing paused, then nodded, finished his meal, and eventually, all retired to their rooms. Tigress found it unusually easy to get to sleep, but upon falling asleep...

 _…_ _she found herself staring down an army advancing on the Valley. The defenders fought to protect the Valley, but were woefully outnumbered. Commanding this army, she saw the Wu sisters._

 _"_ _Pull the defenders back," Lokahviing's voice said. Tigress looked to her left and saw Lokahviing standing there, dressed in those tattered, wraith-esqe robes, his eyes glowing red._

 _"_ _Are you mad?!" Po shouted. "We pull them back-"_

 _"_ _I said pull them back!" Lokahviing hissed in that draconic thrum. Po hesitated, and Song blew the retreat horn. Tigress turned Lokahviing to face her._

 _"_ _What are you going to do?" she asked._

 _"_ _The one thing I do best," Lokahviing responded. "Zu'u los yol... zu'u los nahkriin... zu'u los... dinok." He handed his crossguard lightsaber to Shifu, then walked past the retreating soldiers to confront the Wu army. One crimson lightsaber flared, then the other, as a dragon growl sounded. He shouted, and a clap of thunder sounded in the sky, the clouds twisting as though Lokahviing had awakened the fury of the earth itself. Bolts of fire lashed down from the sky, blasting holes in the Wu army._

Tigress awoke suddenly as she heard Lokahviing roar in rage. She quickly threw off her blanket and rushed to Lokahviing's room, finding him still fast asleep. Did she...?

Tigress processed what she saw in her head as she exited Lokahviing's domicile. Could it be that she had her first vision of the future? Would Lokahviing stand alone before the fury of an army? Would he demonstrate the full extent of his rage?

Would he survive it?

Tigress went back to her room and meditated, trying to find answers, but none came. She decided to go back to sleep, crawled back into bed, and drifted off, her mind still on her vision...

(Things are heating up. Next chapter will follow as soon as I can type it up.)


	8. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

The morning following Tigress' vision, she sought Shifu out. As usual, he was meditating. Tigress bowed, then spoke, "Master, I... I need your wisdom on a new concern."

Shifu woke from his meditation and turned to face Tigress. "I'll tell you what I know, master Tigress. What is this concern of yours?" Tigress inhaled deeply, then began to recount the details of her vision. When she finished, Shifu paced momentarily in thought. Finally, he spoke: "This seems far too vivid to be a random dream. Too... detailed."

"So... I have had a vision of what is to come?" Tigress asked.

"It would seem so," Shifu responded. "But what Lokahviing said, near the end of your dream, before he went to confront the Wu Sisters' army... _zu'u los yol, zu'u los nahkriin, zu'u los dinok_... I'm certain it's in the language Lokahviing calls Dovah. But the meaning..."

"I confess, the meaning of the words elude me, as well," Tigress admitted. "But he spoke them with such... malevolence."

"I'd be inclined to agree, based on what you told me," Shifu agreed. He hummed for a moment in reflection. "This a most disturbing turn of events... your vision suggests that the valley will come under attack by the Wu sisters – incredible, given they've been dormant for years – and that, for one reason or another, Lokahviing will feel compelled – or be compelled – to defend us, standing alone before the fury of the Wu sisters' army."

"Master... in the vision, Lokahviing seemed... angry," Tigress said. "His eyes were glowing red, and he-"

"And he felt that, in the vision, it could be when he earns this," Shifu cut her off, showing her the cracked blue crystal.

Tigress frowned. "What is that?"

"I have reason to believe these are what gives his lightsabers their color," Shifu explained. "I feel I am coming to understand why his lightsabers are the color they are, and why he uses them in different styles. More than necessity. Belief. State of mind."

Tigress thought for a moment, then realized Shifu was on to something. She saw how Lokahviing was when he wielded the violet blade – calm, collected, skilled and graceful. When wielding the crimson blades, he was angry, erratic – vicious and completely unpredictable. But why, then, did he use a violet blade with the former? Why not a...

Comprehension dawned on Tigress. _When I have earned it, you will know what to do with it,_ Lokahviing had told Shifu, when speaking of the crystal. Shifu was right – belief. "So where does this leave us?" Tigress asked.

"I think we should approach Lokahviing, ask him if he knows the Wu sisters," Shifu suggested. "But we should speak to him alone. I don't want to risk the others overhearing this."

"Agreed," Tigress said, rising to her feet. "I don't even want to imagine how Po would react, considering how he took the story of Darth Taral."

"I imagine the reaction would be much less severe, but I still agree," Shifu stated. The two of them headed to Lokahviing's domicile, where they followed the sound of unfamiliar music to a lower area, where Lokahviing sat at a workbench, working on his crossguard lightsaber.

"Master Shifu, Master Tigress," he greeted them, rising from his seat to turn, face them, and bow.

"Master Lokahviing," Shifu and Tigress both responded, returning the bow.

"What brings you to my workshop?" Lokahviing inquired.

"We wanted to ask you... if you knew anything about the Wu sisters, or if you'd heard of them," Tigress said. Shifu and Tigress watched as Lokahviing put a cracked crystal into an open compartment of his crossguard lightsaber, secured it, then closed the compartment. He picked up the weapon, gestured, and it flared to life with that crackling violet blade. He twirled it for a moment, then deactivated it and clipped it.

"Sorry," he apologized, "routine maintenance. Who were you talking about?"

"The Wu sisters – do you know of them?" Shifu repeated the earlier question.

Lokahviing frowned, thought for a moment, then answered, "Trio of feline sisters, extremely arrogant, psychotic, have an _extremely_ annoying laugh?"

Tigress frowned and crossed her arms. "You know them?"

"Not personally," Lokahviing sighed as he sat back down. "Had a run-in with them some months ago, north-west of here. Russia. Nearly killed me, they did. Emergency transport at the last second saved me."

"What were they doing in Russia?" Tigress asked.

"Fuck if I know – all I remember from that incident was they were with a lot of rodents... mercenaries, by the looks of them... Hm... now that I think back on that incident..." Lokahviing mused.

"What is it?" Shifu queried. "What did you see?"

"A lot of military hardware – not the most advanced stuff I'd ever seen; cannons, catapults, things of that nature. They even had a lot of pitch and flammable chemicals," Lokahviing explained. "If I had to guess, I would surmise that they were going after a big target, and they intended to burn it to the ground."

Tigress and Shifu exchanged worried glances. Diverting the topic, Tigress asked, "Lokahviing... can your computer translate... foreign languages?"

Lokahviing raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, why-" he was cut short by a sudden shiver in his spine, evidenced by how he shuddered. "Whatever you need to translate, feel free to use my computer." He rose from his seat and headed toward the exit as his eyes shifted color to red.

"Where are you going?" Shifu asked.

"There's been a disturbance in the Force," Lokahviing said. "And I must seek it out." Lokahviing wordlessly left Tigress and Shifu alone.

"Intriguing," Shifu mumbled. "I had no idea he had a prior encounter with the Wu sisters. Why'd you ask him about his computer's translation capabilities?"

"Something I have to know," Tigress responded, heading upstairs and into the master bedroom, sitting down at the computer terminal. She tapped the computer, and it lit up with characters and letters she was familiar with. She navigated the sub-menus and found the translation suite. She opted for vocal language recognition, and then spoke: _"_ _Zu'u los yol, zu'u los nahkriin, zu'u los dinok."_ The translation software worked momentarily to translate what Tigress spoke as Shifu walked in, and when it finished, Tigress' face turned to shock.

 _"_ _Tigress!"_ Song called out as she ran to the doorway.

Tigress' head whipped over to look at Song as she queried, "What?"

"Trouble!" was all Song said. Tigress looked at the translation one last time, and then ran outside with Song. Shifu approached the computer, looked at the translation, and immediately understood.

 _"_ _I am fire; I am vengeance; I am death."_

Tigress ran down the steps into the valley as fast as her feet could move, and toward an area where the villagers were gathering. She pushed her way through and saw what they were gathered around, murmuring in fear – Lokahviing stood, angry, before another person, a human, by the looks of him. "I told you to stay away," Lokahviing hissed in that dragon voice. "I told you never again to come before me. And yet, here you are."

"You know why-" the human started.

 _"_ _Did you not listen?!"_ Lokahviing screamed, his voice echoing in the air. "I told you what would happen if you came before me again! I warned you! And you still came!"

"This can't go on, K-" the human started again, this time being cut short by Lokahviing making a grabbing gesture with his hand, and the human began to choke. Lokahviing lifted his hand up, and the human was lifted several feet in the air, hanging suspended by his throat.

 _"_ _I let you live, and all you had to do was stay away! Why, Devon? Why did you come back?!"_ Lokahviing demanded.

"You... know why," Devon coughed. "You... can't escape... justice... come-"

 _"_ _I told you that incident was not my doing!"_ Lokahviing exclaimed. _"_ _I told you I had nothing to do with that massacre! I saw what happened that night! I brought to justice the one responsible!"_

"Murder... is still murder... you killed... the only one... who could have... exonerated... you," Devon gurgled out. Lokahviing shifted his hand, and threw the human into a wall.

 _"_ _I will not be taken into custody for a crime I did not commit!"_ Lokahviing yelled. _"_ _I gave you the evidence you needed to clear my name! And what did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?!"_

Devon, no longer being choked, coughed and responded, "I handed that evidence to my direct superior."

"Exactly!" Lokahviing exclaimed. "You gave my freedom to a man you knew beforehand was corrupt and incompetent! I told you if you handed that information to him, it would just disappear, along with me!"

"And I told you my hands were tied," Devon countered. "I couldn't go over his head! You knew what he was like – had I gone against him, I would have disappeared, as well! I have a family to look after!"

"Bullshit!" Lokahviing screamed. "You're only looking after yourself! Why else would you be here, doing a corrupt chief's dirty work?!"

"If what you say is true, you will have no problem proving it in the Justice System," Devon said. "Please, don't make this difficult – I don't want to cause any more of a scene than I already have."

Lokahviing drew one of his lightsabers, activating it with a _snap-hiss!_ "I will not face a justice system that is rigged by a corrupt bureaucrat," Lokahviing hissed. "I was subjected to conditions like that before. I will not be subject to it again!" Lokahviing advanced on Devon, who appeared unarmed. Tigress couldn't let this happen.

"Lokahviing, stop!" she shouted. Lokahviing stopped dead in his tracks, looking over his shoulder at Tigress.

"Is that what you're calling yourself, now?" Devon asked. "Lokahviing? No wonder you escaped us for so long."

"Do not taunt him, whoever the fuck you are!" Tigress sneered. "I don't know what crime you charge him with, but you have no right to come before him accusing him of anything! He has done nothing wrong!"

"Tell that to the hundred-fifty people that died in a industrial colony far from here," Devon stated.

"Didn't you hear him?" Tigress countered. "He had nothing to do with it, and he took down the one responsible; he even handed you the evidence that would have cleared his name – if anything, justice, or lack of, lies with you for handling the evidence irresponsibly and giving it to someone you were warned not to hand it over to!"

"He had no evidence of Chief Boris' corruption," Devon responded.

"It was in the file, dip-shit!" Lokahviing snarled. "It was why I told you not to give it to that fat fuck!"

"Enough, Lokahviing!" Tigress exclaimed. "And you, mister Devon... did you even read the evidence Lokahviing handed you?"

Devon paused for a long moment, then answered, "No. I was under orders to hand any and all evidence to the chief."

"Then you just said it yourself – you admitted your error," Tigress said. "Were it not for your error in judgment..."

"... I would not be here, facing a man who wants me dead for a hunt that has lasted three years," Devon finished. "The last time we met, he nearly killed me. I don't know why he spared me, but he warned me that the next time I came after him... he would finish what he started." He sighed, then continued, "I had a friend on the colony K... Lokahviing... was accused of massacring. For a while, I honored your mercy... but my friend's ghost would not let me rest. Lokahviing, you of all people would know what that's like; I had to end this. Put it to rest. If you are so certain you are innocent, you will have no issue proving it again. Do you have any copies of the evidence you gathered?"

Lokahviing growled and hissed, and Tigress repeated the question: "Do you have any copies of the evidence that proves your innocence?"

Lokahviing remained silent, until his eyes shifted to Tigress, still bearing the malevolent red glow. "Drive J, sub-folder Alpha Three, compressed file Delta-One," he finally said.

Tigress looked back at Devon. "If we give you the file again, can we trust you to review it carefully and hand it to the right people?"

Devon nodded. "You have my word, I will honor this deal."

Tigress looked back at Lokahviing. "Lokahviing, can you get the file?" she asked.

Lokahviing paused still, but eventually extinguished his lightsaber and began to turn toward the Jade Palace. It was completely surprising and unexpected, especially to Tigress, when he suddenly lunged, seized Tigress by her throat, and slammed her against a wall.

"If you ever again interfere in my affairs, I will, I promise you, do you far worse than I would have done Devon. Do I make myself abundantly clear?" he hissed. The villagers murmured in shock and fear, seeing Lokahviing so hostile and holding one of the Furious Fighters by her throat as though he would tear it out.

"Would you really do that to me, Lokahviing? After all we've been through together? All the stories? The pain? The agony? After I've held you as you cried from the torment? Would you really murder me for keeping you from doing something you'd regret?" Tigress asked.

Tigress' words hit home, and Lokahviing's eyes shifted color, returning to that sapphire-blue. His grip loosened, then his hand retracted from her throat, shaking, and he quickly turned away as tears formed in his eyes. "I know you're angry, Lokahviing, but-" Tigress started. Lokahviing abruptly walked away from her. Tigress ran to catch up, but Lokahviing spoke in Dovah, using his Thu'um and catapulting himself into the air, shifting to dragon form mid-trajectory and taking to the sky. Tigress would have run after him, but was stopped by Song.

"Let him go, Tigress... he needs to cool down," she told Tigress.

"And if he decides to leave?" Tigress asked.

"He won't," Shifu assured her as he arrived on the scene. "He has grown attached to us – we're the closest thing to family has. He lost his family once; I doubt he'll do anything that would make it happen twice."

"For now, we have to get the evidence that proves his innocence," Song suggested. Tigress didn't voice a response, but she went back up to the Jade Palace, retrieved the file Lokahviing spoke of, and left it to Song to deliver it to Devon while she pondered in her room what happened today. She felt what happened in the valley would have repercussions, true, but her biggest concern was Lokahviing. He'd nearly been provoked into murder. He was ready to kill her, she could see it in his eyes. But what she said... the response it garnered... she came to realize she was having an influence on him. It could be a good thing and a bad thing. She could get through to him when others couldn't. It was then that she realized something – because of what happened in the valley, many villagers would begin to question whether Lokahviing should stay in the Jade Palace. That could be what compelled Lokahviing to stand alone before the fury of the Wu sisters' army.

Her vision was unfolding.

 _"_ _You see the pieces falling into place, Tigress,"_ Oogway's voice said in her head. _"_ _You cannot stop what is coming."_

"Lokahviing... is important to me, Master," Tigress protested. "I can't let him face this alone."

 _"_ _You must,"_ Oogway said. _"_ _It has already begun. You will have to let him go."_

"I can't," Tigress said, her heart aching. "He deserves better."

 _"_ _That he does... but even you will not be able to stop him,"_ Oogway told her. _"_ _Don't fight this. As I told Shifu, many meet their destiny on the path they take to avoid it."_

Tears welled up in Tigress' eyes. "So he will stand alone against an army, just to prove his loyalty," she surmised.

 _"_ _It was his destiny. Past the pain, past the sins and torment, he was meant to come here and find peace,"_ Oogway affirmed.

"Will he die?" Tigress asked.

 _"_ _Difficult to say,"_ Oogway replied. _"_ _As he would quote, 'Always in motion is the future.' All I can tell you is that, soon, his fate will be in your hands, and you will have to make a decision that will affect and define you both. Your destiny... is tied to his."_

Oogway's voice left Tigress' consciousness, and Tigress felt that some hours had passed. She looked up, and Song walked in her room. "It's done," Song reported.

"Lokahviing?" Tigress asked.

"Cleared of all charges," Song answered. "As for where he is... he's at the pool of sacred tears."

"Has he asked to see me?" Tigress queried.

"Unknown," Song replied. "The others heard about what happened; they won't go near him."

"And Shifu?" Tigress asked.

"He thinks it a good idea if you talk to him," Song told her. "He seems to be of the belief that at present, you're the only one who can."

Tigress nodded, then left her room. "Be careful," Song said.

"I will," Tigress responded. She walked, alone, up the path, to the pool of sacred tears, where Lokahviing stood, in normal form, absolutely still. For a good five minutes, no words were said. Tigress eventually broke the silence.

"Lokahviing, I know how you must feel, right now."

"I wish to be alone," Lokahviing croaked.

"You and I both know that's not true," Tigress countered. "If you wanted to be alone, you would have left us a long time ago, returned to the life of a wanderer. You say you want solitude, but your heart says differently."

"And how do you know what my heart says?" Lokahviing asked.

"Because mine says the same thing," Tigress answered. "We're one and the same, you and I."

Lokahviing sniffled before continuing, "I nearly went dark again. I would have killed Devon. Would have killed you. And I'm so sorry – I shouldn't have lashed out at you. You did not deserve it."

Tigress walked behind Lokahviing and wrapped her arms around him. "Even I lose control from time to time, say things I don't mean," she told him. "It's only normal. You were under a lot of stress. I don't condone what you said, but I understand why you said it. I've been down that road myself, remember?"

"I threatened to kill you, and yet you're holding me like crying kin," Lokahviing said softly, his voice shaking. Tigress gave him a soft kiss on the cheek.

"Because I care, Lokahviing," she assured him. "I know you. I know what it's like to be you. I know what rage and anger feels like."

"You and I both know it's more than that," Lokahviing told her. Tigress chuckled softly, purring in his ear.

"I've grown rather attached to you, Lokahviing," she told him. "You're a good person, tormented by a long, harsh past. I believe you can be at peace here, and that you deserve better than what you were forced to endure." She gently squeezed him, holding him close. "If nothing else, please believe I want you here, with me, more than ever."

"Leaving was never my intention," Lokahviing stated. "But the pain..."

"The pain will pass," Tigress whispered to him. "Mine did. Even the pain of denial I felt eventually passed, and I came to be a close friend of Po's. I still am. No darkness lasts forever. I may not be able to see things like you, but I see that your dawn is fast approaching."

Lokahviing turned to face Tigress, and Tigress pulled him into a warm hug, holding him there in her embrace. It was in each other's arms that Tigress had another thought. "Devon knows your real name, doesn't he?"

"I'm surprised he never spoke it," Lokahviing responded.

"I won't ask you to speak it now – after what you recently went through, it would seem... wrong of me, somehow," Tigress said.

"I, uh... hate to interrupt," came Po's voice, "But dinner's nearly ready, and I thought, after what happened, you two would be up for a hot meal."

Tigress and Lokahviing reluctantly released each other, and followed Po back to the Jade Palace. But this experience, and the accompanying revelation, had shaken Tigress. The vision was unfolding before her, and she would soon decide Lokahviing's fate, three centuries in the making...

(Apologies for the delay. Had a few things that... cropped up.)


	9. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Weeks rolled by after the incident. The villagers grew restless. Lokahviing refused to leave the Jade Palace for fear of a repeat incident, or being confronted by a misunderstanding villager. Many among the valley populace, as Tigress suspected, began to question whether Lokahviing should stay, and a bold few stating openly that he should be expelled from the valley. These upstarts were always corrected, but Tigress and her friends were hesitant to approach Lokahviing about this, feeling that he'd been through enough. Unknown to Tigress, Lokahviing was well aware of the situation, and felt that he had to show the Valley of Peace that he was not their enemy.

It was as Tigress was entering Lokahviing's room, one fateful day, that she realized Lokahviing was not unaware. He was standing in his room, listening to what sounded like orchestral music that sounded dramatic and vocalized. "Lokahviing?" she spoke, trying to get his attention.

"I'm fine... or I will be, soon," Lokahviing replied, never opening his eyes.

"What do you mean?" Tigress asked.

"I know of the unrest in the Valley," he said. "I know some of them want me gone; I don't blame them."

"They're just afraid, Lokahviing," Tigress told him walking beside him. "They don't understand what we have come to understand."

"I know," Lokahviing murmured, "And you and your friends have done an admirable job keeping them from revolting or doing anything drastic. But, as I sense it... it will not be enough. They have to see from me that I am not their enemy."

"You've no need to prove yourself, Lokahviing," Tigress said. "You've proven enough."

"If what I sense is accurate... it won't matter," Lokahviing said.

"What is it?" Tigress asked. "What do you sense?"

"Something is out there," Lokahviing answered, "Something that calls to me. I felt it many times before, as you know – it drew me here, drew me to you, to feel for you, and now... it comes for me."

Tigress was shocked. "Are you... leaving?"

"No... if ever there was a time to leave, that chance has come and gone already," Lokahviing sighed. "They come to raze the valley to the ground. And now, I know what I must do. What must happen before I ever find peace. One final massacre. One final rampage. One last crusade."

Tigress couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Who?" she asked, desperate for answers. "Who will draw your rage?" The answer came faster than Lokahviing could speak as the alarm horn blew. Tigress ran outside and, in the distance, saw a massive army marching on the Valley.

The vision. It was happening as it had in her vision. Her decision. Lokahviing's fate, his solitary stand against an army intent in burning everything to the ground. She and the Furious Fighters headed down into the Valley, past the screaming villagers and farmers running from the advancing horde, and soldiers of the Valley rushed to stall the enemy advance. Tigress and her friends joined the fight, taking out one enemy soldier after the other, fighting as only warriors of the Jade Palace could. But something wasn't right. This wasn't part of her vision. Where was the impossible odds? Where was Lokahviing, dressed like a wraith? Tigress fractionally pondered this between one soldier's defeat and another's. This wasn't right. She had no idea how long the battle had been raging when a horn blew, and for a moment, Tigress thought it was that retreat horn she heard in her vision, but realized it was the enemy when they started running away. The valley defenders cheered, but Tigress was convinced – something was amiss. She and the fighters headed back toward the village, and was just entering the perimeter when another horn blew, and when Tigress looked back, her face paled. The enemy didn't retreat; they _regrouped_. The valley defenders lined up to challenge the attackers again, but deafening booming could be heard in the distance, and shortly thereafter, the defenders' lines were bombarded by artillery fire. Catapults fired flaming ordinance, Cannons blew valiant defenders away, and the enemy again charged. This time, however, the defenders were completely outnumbered and outmatched. Just as it had been in Tigress' vision. She looked beyond the battle lines, and saw the Wu sisters, riding on a battle platform.

"Pull the defenders back," came Lokahviing's voice. Tigress looked to her left, and there stood Lokahviing, dressed in those tattered, wraith-esqe robes, his eyes glowing red with malevolent rage.

"Are you mad?!" Po shouted over the battle. "We pull them back-"

 _"_ _I said pull them back!"_ Lokahviing hissed in his dragon voice. Po hesitated, and Song blew the retreat horn. The defenders started making for the village, and Tigress turned to Lokahviing.

"What are you going to do?" she asked him.

"The one thing I do best," Lokahviing answered. He handed his crossguard lightsaber to Shifu as he growled, _"_ _Zu'u los yol... zu'u los nahkriin... zu'u... los... dinok..."_

He marched onto the battlefield as Viper asked, "What's he doing? What did he say?"

"I am fire... I am vengeance... I am... death..." Tigress droned. Comprehension dawned, but far too late: "My god, he's going to fight them!"

And Tigress was right; Lokahviing drew both his lightsabers, igniting them one after the other with a _snap-hiss, snap-hiss_. Tigress and the others heard a dragon growl, before Lokahviing shouted a Thu'um to the sky, a clap of thunder following his voice, and the sky itself twisted and churned, as though Lokahviing had awakened the very fury of the elements. In a blink, a bolt of fire lashed down from above and caused an explosion. Just as quickly, another bolt came from the sky, then another, and _another_ , until it seemed the Wu army had come under artillery fire from the sky, blasting holes in the Wu army's lines until they were considerably reduced from what they once were. When this arial bombardment ended, Lokahviing shouted, his voice morphing into a dragon roar, as he then ran to the enemy soldiers, and shouted _"_ _WULD!"_ and was catapulted to them, emitting a shrill, ear-piercing shriek before he landed and fought the Wu army with inhuman speed, the twin crimson blades moving in a whirling light show of rage. Lokahviing became a whirlwind of death and destruction as he brought all his power to bear on the enemy; fire swirled, lightning lashed, varied energy exploded, and Lokahviing mercilessly dispatched the soldiers that had set out to burn the valley down.

"What is he doing?!" Song exclaimed.

"Proving himself," Tigress replied. "Proving to us, to the villagers, the farmers, the valley – he is not our enemy. He is our protector."

"And we brought him to do this," Shifu said solemnly, gripping the lightsaber Lokahviing had handed him earlier. "We must bear the consequences of what results from this."

As Lokahviing cut a burning swath through the Wu army, he became faster, more erratic, and more enraged. In a move that seemed to slow time itself, he curled up, drawing energy into himself as flames sprung up around his body, ready for one massive explosion. But it was more than that, Tigress realized; _he was shifting form._ Lokahviing's power exploded outward, and sent the enemy soldiers in the immediate vicinity sprawling to the ground, who then got up and ran back toward the Wu sisters. Lokahviing, now in dragon form, roared in rage and defiance. The Wu sisters called out to him: "It matters not if you win this day, dragon; we will have our revenge!"

This only served to provoke Lokahviing further. _"_ _Revenge?"_ he shouted back, getting even angrier, _"_ _Revenge?! REVENGE?! I'LL SHOW YOU REVENGE!"_ He took to the sky, and chased after the fleeing Wu soldiers, breathing fire over them in a fit of rage. He flew over the enemy, burning them all. He eventually reached the Wu sisters themselves, shifting back to normal form and engaging them immediately, becoming a blur as he fought them single-handedly. He struck down one, then the other, and when Su Wu was alone, he fought her until he sent a blast into her that sent her flying off her battle platform and toward a massive rock formation. She slowly stood up, facing Lokahviing defiantly, who gestured, and sent her flying again, this time into the rock formation and pinning her there; Lokahviing hunched over, holding his hands parallel, as energy gathered between his palms. The ground began to vibrate, then tremble, and grew more powerful as he gathered more energy.

Trying to maintain her balance, Song commented, "Just what we need – an earthquake."

"It's no earthquake," Tigress corrected her, "It's Lokahviing. It's the power of a dragon's rage being brought to bear on the enemy that provoked him." Lokahviing could be heard roaring in anger, and he sent the energy at Su Wu, the kinetic ball striking her with blazing speed and causing fragments of rock to explode outward. The rock formation, unable to cope with this new hole, cracked and crumbled, and buried Su Wu beneath tons of rock. Lokahviing turned back toward the valley and walked, the flames around him dying down into embers as he walked. As everyone looked on, they saw the devastation caused by the dragon. Though no one said it, Tigress could feel it – they now knew. Lokahviing single-handedly defended them from an army that would have laid waste to the entire valley. It took an hour for Lokahviing to reach them, and even when he did, he looked beyond exhausted. Viper noticed something, but before she could speak, Lokahviing was confronted by one of the villagers.

"You don't belong here, dragon," he coldly proclaimed. A few other villagers shouted in agreement.

"Go back to the hell that spawned you, demon!" another villager shouted.

"Begone, murderer!" exclaimed another.

As the insults grew, so did Tigress' discontent. She had to stop this. _"_ _Enough!"_ her voice boomed, echoing in the sky and drawing the attention of the villagers. She approached the man who spoke first and sent a punch across his face, causing him to stagger and fall to the ground. "How dare you judge the man who just saved your sorry ass!"

"He's a demon, master Tigress!" protested the second villager who'd spoken. "We can't let him stay!"

"He has no right to be-" began the third.

"Has as much right to be here as you, or me, or any one of us! Were it not for him, we would not have survived this night! The Wu sisters and their army would have sent us all packing!" Tigress shouted. "None of you have any right to proclaim him unfit to be here! None of you have any right to call him demon! He is no such thing! He is a dragon! He is a man! He is a warrior who deserves our respect!"

"Tigress..." Viper spoke, her attention fixed on Lokahviing's hands.

"Shut it, Viper! This has to be done! Someone has to speak up for Lokahviing's sake!" Tigress snapped. She turned to the villager who demanded Lokahviing begone. "And you – why don't you fucking begone?! I didn't see you out there fighting that army! I didn't see you risk your life out there!"

"I'm no warrior, master-" the villager started.

"Exactly! You aren't a warrior!" Tigress cut him off. She pointed at Lokahviing. " _He_ is a warrior! A man of honor! A protector of this valley! You think he has any wish to harm us? Look at what he did out there! Look at it!" She fiercely indicated the smoldering battlefield. "Had Lokahviing wanted to harm us, he would have turned that on us! He would have burned this valley to the ground and we wouldn't have been able to do shit to stop him! He saved this valley, today! What more must happen to him before we all decide he's had enough?! He was a broken man when he arrived, he was a broken man before he came here, he is still a broken man! When will you all stop judging and start understanding?!"

"Tigress!" Viper shouted, trying to get her attention. _"_ _Look!"_ Tigress looked to Viper, then to Lokahviing's shaking hands, dripping with green fluid. He had trailed it into the village from the battlefield, drop by drop. Thunder clapped and rain began to fall, and as Lokahviing stood, dripping green, Tigress realized what it was.

 _Blood._

"If you value me so highly... you must end this..." he said. After speaking, his lightsabers dropped from his hands, and Lokahviing, himself, fell to the ground.

"Lokahviing!" Tigress shouted, rushing to his side. She picked him up and laid his head in her arms. "Don't do this now, Lokahviing," she pleaded, "Give me a sign, here."

"The final piece falls into place," Lokahviing said weakly. "You have to see it. You have to see what they did to me with your own eyes."

"What who did to you?" Viper asked.

"His kin," Tigress surmised. "His enemies. His past." She reached down, and tore open Lokahviing's tattered robes, revealing multiple wounds seeping green blood. Viper gasped in shock, Song recoiled in surprise, and everyone gathered around – Tigress, Shifu, the furious fighters, the villagers – at last saw the bleeding wounds of three centuries of pain and suffering.

"Someone fetch Mei Ling!" one of the villagers shouted.

"How?" Tigress asked Lokahviing. "How long have you had these?"

"Ever since I left Earth," Lokahviing coughed. "They've always been a part of my mind."

"Why did you never tell me?!" Tigress demanded.

"You had to see it yourself," Lokahviing said. "Those who have seen me... in my darkest anger and rage, who have seen the devastation I have caused... can see the wounds my kin, my past, left on me... manifest as physical things."

Tigress looked down at Lokahviing's wounds, tears flowing. "I'm so sorry, Lokahviing," she told him.

Lokahviing reached up to touch her face. "Don't be. This wasn't your fault. And here... I can finally be at peace."

"No, Lokahviing, don't," Tigress pleaded. "Don't leave us. Don't leave me."

"Why?" Lokahviing asked. "Of what interest am I to you? Why can't I die in peace?"

Tigress smiled, lips trembling, heart racing and chest swelling, as she took Lokahviing's hand and told him, "Because I love you, Lokahviing."

Tigress shook, her feelings confessed, after keeping them to herself, burying them deep down, but Lokahviing chuckled weakly. "You... you love me... heh... there was a time when I yearned for, yet dreaded to hear those words... could you love me? A dragon? Could you find it in your heart to love a creature that caused so much destruction in the name of vengeance?"

"But you didn't do it in the name of Vengeance, Lokahviing – you did it to defend the place you've come to call home. To protect the people you've come to call family," Tigress told him. "To keep the woman who loves you from suffering the same fate as so many others you've known."

Lokahviing scoffed softly. "That's... an interesting way of looking at it."

"It's the truth," one of the villagers said. "What we saw today is a sight we will always remember – a dragon protecting our valley from invaders single-handedly."

"None of us could ever truly repay you for such a valiant act," another agreed. "Tigress is right – you belong among us, Dragon."

As other villagers put in their various agreements, Lokahviing lowered his head with a smile. "So," he said, "After three centuries... I finally found a place to call home..." He looked back up at Tigress. "And you said you love me... this may not be the best time to say it, but... I love you, too. With all my heart."

Tigress smiled, leaned down, gently locking her lips with Lokahviing's in the first kiss she ever felt. She felt, for the first time since Po, loved by a great man. When their lips separated, he whispered in her ear, "Kyle."

Tigress smiled, knowing what Lokahviing was saying. "It's good to know your name, sweetheart."

"It's... good to hear it, after so long," Lokahviing agreed.

"Is he gonna die, mommy?" asked a young rabbit child. The child's mother shushed the child, and Tigress' face shifted to determination. She knew what to do.

"Not if I can help it," she said as Mei Ling arrived. She hefted one of Lokahviing's arms around her shoulder and lifted him to his feet. "We need to get him out of the rain and get these wounds sealed before he bleeds to death."

"My sentiments exactly," Mei Ling said. She hefted Lokahviing's other arm, and they carried him to Mei Ling's place, where they laid him on an operating table and set to work. It went on for hours, but as the moon began to sink from high in the night sky, they had finished, and Lokahviing laid still, breathing steadily. When it was all done, Tigress was elated. He was alive, and she was in love.

"He can't stay here, Tigress," Mei Ling said.

"Nor shall he," Tigress replied. "I'll get him to his room."

"Not yet," Shifu said. He stood in the doorway, holding Lokahviing's lightsabers. He walked over, and laid them both on his chest. He then reached in his robes, and pulled out the crossguard lightsaber. Lokahviing looked over at him. Shifu activated the crossguard lightsaber, the violet blade flaring to life. "I never understood why this blade was this color... until today. You carry your red blades as a symbol of your anger and rage. This blade... symbolizes another part of you. You feel that this represents the good in you, your Jedi side. But, you don't believe you deserve to carry the blue blade, as the Jedi would, but at the same time, you don't ascribe to the way of the Sith, or this blade would be red. No, you chose this color because it represents the light within you, a hope that one day, you will earn the blue blade." He deactivated the lightsaber, opened a compartment, and tipped the hilt over, and a small, cracked violet crystal popped out. He then went into his robe, and retrieved the blue crystal. "You said that, when you had earned this, I would know what to do with it," he said. He placed the crystal inside the hilt, secured it, shut the compartment, and activated it again, the blade coming to life in bright blue color. "Facing what you did out there to defend the valley... I can say you've earned this, today." He extinguished the blade and placed the lightsaber on Lokahviing's chest.

"Thank you, master," Lokahviing said.

"No – thank you, Lokahviing," Shifu replied. Tigress stood beside Lokahviing, and tenderly kissed him. "Let's get you home, Kyle." With aid from the others, Tigress got Lokahviing to his feet, and began the trek up the steps to the Jade Palace...

(Think this is the end? Think again.)


	10. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

By the break of dawn, Lokahviing was back in his domicile, asleep on his bed. Tigress sat next to him, her head resting on his chest, fast asleep herself. Po, walking in with a tray of food, couldn't help but chuckle seeing her like that. He set the tray down on a nearby counter top, and gently shook Tigress. "Tigress," he murmured to her.

"I was only napping," Tigress spoke groggily on waking suddenly.

"You were out for several hours," Po chuckled. "Thought you and him would be hungry."

Tigress smiled, seeing what Po brought, and gave his hand on her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "Thank you, Po."

Po returned the smile. "Anything for a friend," he told her. He looked at Lokahviing. "How's he holding up?"

Tigress chuckled softly, remembering what Lokahviing sounded like when he slept. "Ask him, yourself."

"He's asleep, Tigress," Po said. "It'd be rude to wake him up for such a frivolous-"

"He's not asleep, Po," Tigress said.

"How can you tell?" Po asked.

"He snores when he sleeps," Tigress replied with a broad smile, eliciting a smile and a soft chuckle from Lokahviing.

"I was waiting for you to catch on," he said. "Seems you remember what you learned of me."

"How could I forget, Kyle?" Tigress asked.

"Kyle?" Po repeated with a frown. "I thought his name was Lokahviing?"

"Lokahviing... is my dragon name," Lokahviing replied. "My given name... the name I was born with... is Kyle."

"Remember when we first met him?" Tigress asked Po. "He said he didn't want his real name widely known. I imagine, given what has transpired to this point, he has grown comfortable with us knowing him by his human name." She stroked Lokahviing's cheek. "And I look forward to learning the rest of your story, Kyle... one bit after the other." She leaned down and kissed his lips briefly before adding, "Are you hungry at all?"

"I am, actually," he affirmed. Tigress smiled happily, helping Lokahviing sit up while Po got the food he'd brought. Lokahviing groaned as he sat up, popping his neck slowly.

"Easy, baby," Tigress cautioned him.

"Yeah, I think I heard Mei Ling recommending you stay off your feet for at least two weeks," Po said.

"I would be inclined to agree," came Shifu's voice from the doorway. "You were in bad shape after that battle. Truthfully... I did not think you would have survived it. But, as I have come to understand it... Tigress pulled you through."

"Master..." Tigress began.

"Tigress," Shifu cut her off, "I don't address you today as your master, but as the father that cared for you since childhood. Did you not think I knew it would eventually come to this?"

"M... father, I don't understand-" Tigress said.

"But you do," Shifu interrupted. "There's no shame in love, and there's no need to hide your relationship with Lokahviing."

"Yeah, that's another thing I wanted to tell you," Po said. "Everyone knows. The villagers, the farmers, shopkeepers, everyone here... everyone in the valley."

Tigress looked at Po. "And what are they saying?"

"That you both are perfect for each other, and that you make an adorable couple," Shifu answered before Po could. "It makes me proud. You have done more than I ever hoped."

Lokahviing downed a bit of his breakfast. "So... what happens now?"

"At this point, that depends on you," Shifu answered. "You've done so much for us, but we still don't have the full story of how you came to be here... and then there's the matter of your carrier ship."

"What of it?" Lokahviing asked.

"What do you intend to do with it?" Shifu asked.

Lokahviing sighed. "I don't intend to do away with it... but at the same time, I no longer have any intention of leaving. Regardless, I imagine it should be... raised. Brought here, so it is close at hand if we ever need it or its contents again."

"It's contents?" Po queried.

"I have a lot of equipment on my ship," Lokahviing explained, pausing to down more of his meal. "Weapons, armors, things that could help defend this valley. More importantly, it... has what I like to call an Electronic Forge. Anything we could ever need, it can make. It's a piece of technology I held onto, one that uses the power of the Force itself to create anything."

"And where is your ship?" Shifu asked.

"I submerged it beneath the South China Sea. Deep enough that it will remain undisturbed until I have need of it, and in an area that is not ordinarily frequented by anyone," Lokahviing answered.

"Let's worry about the details later," Tigress suggested. "Right now, we should give thanks we are all alive thanks to Kyle, and we have secured his place among us."

"Indeed," Shifu agreed. "You're in no condition to head out now, but neither should you rush your recovery. Last I heard, what was left of the Wu army was still running west. I doubt there is any immediate concerns, and I feel you deserve a long rest from your ordeal." Shifu looked to Tigress. "And as his lover, I imagine you'll want to look after him until he's on his feet again."

Tigress smiled broadly. "Wouldn't have it any other way," She said. Shifu chuckled warmly.

"Then I will leave you two alone. We all are excused from training for the next week, in light of not just this incident, but also this happy union," Shifu said officiously. He walked out of the room, and as he did, Mei Ling walked in carrying her medical equipment.

"Good to see you awake," she said. "How are you holding up?"

"As good as can be expected, all things considered," Lokahviing replied. "I assume you know that Tigress and I-"

"Are in a relationship, I know," Mei Ling chuckled. "And I'm fifty coin richer."

Lokahviing raised an eyebrow. "You were betting on us?"

"Yep," Mei Ling affirmed. "I told a few friends you and Tigress would end up together. Oh, there were doubters, for certain, but I had complete faith that, despite your differences, and your heavy militancy, Lokahviing, you and Tigress would come to love each other. As an old friend of Tigress'... like she felt of you, I felt she deserved better."

"Are people really calling us an adorable couple?" Tigress asked with a small laugh.

"You better believe it," Mei Ling chuckled as she examined Lokahviing's bandages. "One of the villagers I spoke to even said, and I quote, 'I smell a wedding in the future'."

Tigress blushed, and Lokahviing shook his head with a smile. "Hours into the relationship, and already, people are thinking that."

"And don't think I haven't noticed how some of your personality has rubbed off on Tigress, Lokahviing," Mei Ling said. "We all heard how she spoke in the valley after the attack – she's beginning to talk a lot like you."

"Bite me," Lokahviing and Tigress said together. Mei Ling laughed hard, eliciting laughs from Tigress and Lokahviing, as well.

"You two really are perfect for each other," Mei Ling commented. "Anyway, Lokahviing, I'd advise you keep off your feet for a while."

"Not much choice," Lokahviing responded. "At least Tigress can keep me company."

"Yes, and now that we're awake, there's something I want to discuss with you in private, sweetheart," Tigress said.

"I'll leave you two alone, then," Mei Ling responded as she left the room. When she was out of earshot, Tigress spoke:

"Ever since becoming your girlfriend, I've been tossing around in my head the idea of you and I sharing this place," Tigress sat down on the bed next to Lokahviing. "But I won't force it on you if you don't think you're ready."

"Tigress," Lokahviing said, "Even though you don't have all the details, you know my story well enough to know I've spent enough time alone. I would relish the chance to live together with you. For one, you'd be the first woman who I lived with, and two... I don't want to be apart from you, after everything you've done."

Tigress smiled softly, leaning on Lokahviing's head. "Months ago, I barely knew your name, and was concerned with your ways and methods. Now... now, I can't imagine my life without you. I love you, Kyle."

"I love you, too, Tigress," Lokahviing said softly.

"How would you say that in Dovah?" Tigress asked with a loving smile.

 _"_ _Zu'u lokaal hi, Tigress,"_ Lokahviing whispered to her. They shared a tender kiss, before Lokahviing continued, "If you want to live with me, I have no objections. After everything that's happened to me alone, not to mention you before and after you met me... I think the others will understand. We have earned this much."

"Agreed," Tigress said. "But we can move my stuff at another time. Right now, we can celebrate – today begins a new road, a new journey we will take together."

"I hear that," Lokahviing agreed. "Which reminds me, I have something I was saving for a special occasion in the fridge. Could you get it for me? It's the case with the blue bottles in the left-side fridge." Tigress complied, leaving for Lokahviing's kitchen and going into the left-side fridge, spotting the bottles easily enough. It was as she was reaching for them that Po asked,

"Is this a private party, or can anyone join?" Tigress looked up from the door to see Po, Song, Monkey, Crane, Viper, Mantis, and Shifu standing there. Looking down at the bottles, she realized there was more than enough to go around.

"Honey, would you have any objections sharing these?" Tigress called out to Lokahviing.

"None," Lokahviing replied. "But I warn you all, they have a strong kick."

"I was unaware you kept spirits in that fridge," Shifu chuckled. "I haven't had spirits in a very long time."

"What exactly are they?" Song asked as Tigress brought the cases into the master bedroom and gave out bottles to the others.

"Romulan Ale," Lokahviing said, force-pulling a bottle into his hand. "I have a large, but limited, supply, and I save them for special occasions."

"This is a special occasion," Shifu stated. They all uncorked their respective bottles, and held them out.

"To new journeys, and new horizons," Lokahviing toasted. They all tapped their bottles together, and took a drink. Lokahviing and Tigress looped arms and drank, then kissed.

"Wow," Shifu commented with a squint. "That _is_ strong stuff." He coughed, then took another swig.

"Whoa," Mantis said groggily, swaying a bit. "Is anyone feeling dizzy?"

"Told you," Lokahviing chuckled.

"Monkey, you might want to pick him up," Tigress suggested.

"This would make a good tavern drink," Song complimented.

"Yeah, no," Lokahviing said with an amused chuckle. "The Romulans were unwilling to share the recipe with me, and even if they did, it'd take years just to brew the stuff."

"Father," Tigress spoke, changing the subject, "After... after discussing the idea with Kyle, he and I have agreed that we wish to share this domicile."

Shifu smiled broadly. "I was wondering when that would happen," he said. "And I couldn't agree more. But the moving... can wait, for now."

"No rush," Lokahviing and Tigress said in unison.

"Just wait – before you know it, Tigress will be swinging lightsabers," Song joked. Everyone present laughed. Tigress felt happy, seeing that her newfound relationship had such support from her friends. Even so, she wondered what was in store for her and Lokahviing now – would she see herself getting married? Having children? Grandchildren? The further she thought, the happier things became. But for now... she rejoiced, she celebrated, and stood by her newfound love's side...

}}}}} {{{{{

Day quickly became night, and everyone remained in Lokahviing – and now, Tigress' – domicile, talking, joking, reminiscing, and having a good time. When the time came for everyone to retire for the night, Tigress remained in the domicile with Lokahviing.

"I have to say, Kyle, that was the first time since you've been here that I have seen you laugh like that," Tigress commented.

"Contrary to popular belief, baby, I do laugh," Lokahviing said. He sighed, then asked, "Since we're sharing this place, I've been meaning to ask – where are you sleeping?"

Tigress smiled wryly. "Guess," she told him.

Lokahviing chuckled. "You sure you don't mind that?"

"I don't if you don't," Tigress affirmed. Lokahviing laughed as he laid back.

"Not even a day into this relationship, and we're already sharing a domicile and a bed," he commented. "Anything else you want to share?"

"Oh, shush, you," Tigress laughed softly. She crawled into bed next to Lokahviing and wrapped her arms around him. "Besides, someone needs to be here in case you have another nightmare, and given the history between us, I'd rather it be me."

Lokahviing chuckled lovingly and leaned his head on Tigress. "That's sweet of you," he murmured to her. Tigress didn't verbally respond, just cooed in contentment as she laid next to Lokahviing, slowly drifting off to sleep.

"See you in the morning, Kyle," was the last thing she said before falling asleep.

"Likewise, darling," Lokahviing whispered back.

(Apologies for the long delay; life has been hectic. And I've had a massive case of writer's block. But I still have some new chapters for you to read.)


	11. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

Tigress slowly awoke in the morning to find herself in Lokahviing's arm, his hand resting on her side. She smiled when she didn't hear him snoring. "How sweet of you to wait until I wake up," she told him. Lokahviing chuckled.

"Tried to stand up ten minutes ago, but could barely get to my feet," he said, "Wasn't going to test it, so I laid back down. Didn't want to hurt myself any more than I already was."

"That's... actually a good sign, considering you've been on bed rest for only a day," Tigress remarked. "But still, don't rush it, Kyle."

"Wasn't trying to; I was going to get on the computer," Lokahviing responded. "For one thing, someone tried to contact me, earlier, and for another... during the recovery process, it's vital to keep the mind occupied."

Tigress shrugged, stretched, yawned, and rose from bed. "Good point," she said, helping Lokahviing up and getting him to his chair. He went to work, and accessed the communication log, curling his lips with a somewhat surprised expression.

"Hm. Look at that – Thel called," he commented.

"Your old Sangheili friend?" Tigress asked. "Are you going to call him back?"

"I was thinking about it, yeah," Lokahviing responded. "And I'm sure he'll want to meet the woman whom I gave my heart to." Tigress smiled, knowing her agreement need not be spoken as Lokahviing accessed the relay and sent a call to Thel. It didn't take long for him to answer, and when he did, Tigress was greeted by an alien face, one that had aged, leathery brown skin, four jaw-like mandibles, and yellow eyes. He seemed surprised to see Lokahviing.

"Kyle... are you... are you alright? What's happened?" Thel asked, his voice sounding deep and throaty. "And who is that with you?"

"Old friend, I apologize for... the long silence," Lokahviing apologized. "Much has happened since last we spoke. The injuries... are a recent development. And the woman with me is my... my new girlfriend, Tigress."

Thel's expression lightened – or Tigress thought it did, she didn't know how to read a Sangheili face – and Thel made what Tigress assumed was a smile. "Pleased to meet you, miss Tigress," Thel greeted her. "I imagine Kyle told you who I am."

"He did," Tigress spoke, "Thel 'Vadam, of the Sangheili. He told me you were one of his closest friends."

"I'm curious – what happened to Kyle? Did he get into some sort of scrape?" Thel asked.

"It's a long story, Thel, so bear with us," Lokahviing sighed, and began to recount the tale of his tenure in the Valley of Peace, with Tigress explaining some bits and being emotional support. When Lokahviing finished, Thel sat back in his chair.

"So... it seems that, after all these years, you have finally found that which you sought," he said. "Peace of mind, peace of soul... and the love of a woman who understands what it means to be you." He chuckled. "Master Tigress, you have accomplished something that no one in three hundred years has ever done. You have calmed the raging storm of this dragon's mind, and opened his heart for the first time since he left his home. Consider me impressed; that's no small feat."

"It wasn't easy," Tigress commented. "And I didn't think it would be."

"Indeed," Thel stated. "And I would not have expected it to be any easier for you than it was for me. Kyle... can be a hard man to know. But in the end, it's all worth it. Speaking of which... old friend, while you've been away, your initiative has been successful."

Lokahviing frowned. "My initiative?" he asked in confusion.

"Yes – the one that revitalized the UNSC and Sangheili peoples, our fleets... everything. And you'll be pleased to know we've kept it out of Covenant hands," Thel reported.

"What is he talking about?" Tigress asked Lokahviing. Lokahviing thought for a moment, then closed his eyes and chuckled.

"The Shipyard Initiative," he explained. "I had forgotten about that. When I met the Sangheili, they and the UNSC were having a hard time rebuilding their factions, which were largely depleted by the end of the UNSC-Covenant War."

"A war that was started by the lies of the Covenant Prophet Hierarchs," Thel said solemnly. "The Leaders of the Covenant, at the time – the Prophets of Regret, Mercy, and _Truth_ ," Thel stressed Truth with a degree of anger, "Lied to the Covenant and mandated the UNSC's extermination. It was genocide that the Sangheili were tricked into partaking in. In the waning months of the war, I uncovered the prophets' treachery, and lead my people against them, forming an alliance with the humans of the UNSC to end the war. But a lot of damage was done, and in the following conflicts, the UNSC and the Sangheili found themselves in a difficult spot, which is when I met Kyle."

"Remember the Electronic Forge I told you about?" Lokahviing asked Tigress. She nodded. "Between the electronic forge, and the holographic crew of my ship, Thel and I came to realize that those technologies would potentially revitalize the UNSC and Sangheili fleets, and better combat the Covenant Remnant."

"It took three years to convince him to lend us such technology," Thel said. "He was understandably concerned that if such technology fell into the hands of the Covenant or some other enemy, it would cause far more damage than the UNSC-Covenant war ever did."

"So why tell me now?" Lokahviing asked. "Is the Covenant Remnant now gone?"

"Getting there," Thel affirmed. "The new fleets are pursuing them across the galaxy. But, in honor of you, who brought us the means to rebuild our people, the UNSC and the Sangheili decided to collaborate and commission a flagship for you, so that you may sail among the stars as a leader. And it seems more important now than before, seeing as you have a lover, a family, and a new home."

Tigress' eyes lit up. "You mean, you could give us the means to defend ourselves from threats among the stars?"

"That is exactly what I imply," Thel answered.

"And what ship did you have in mind? Or were you going to ask me?" Lokahviing asked.

"That was Plan A, but you never picked up, and that was months ago," Thel responded, "But I had an idea of the kind of ship you ordinarily favored." He worked on his computer, and on Lokahviing's computer, a 3D image of an arrow-shaped starship appeared.

"Is that what I think it is?" Lokahviing inquired.

"Indeed it is," Thel affirmed. "Predator-class Star Battleship. We found it among the computer files you left behind, and decided it would be perfect for you. We named it the _Iron Regent_ , after the one warship you told the story about, the one you told my grandson of." Lokahviing smiled and chuckled, and Tigress wrapped her arms around him.

"So we will be able to protect our home from threats foreign _and_ domestic," Tigress said before Lokahviing could.

"Be careful what you pick up from me, dear," Lokahviing lovingly warned her. "And Thel... thank you. Perhaps, after I recover, we might see you on Sangheilios."

Thel grinned. "I'd look forward to it, Kyle." He paused, looking elsewhere, then back at Lokahviing. "In any event, old friend, I must go. Give my regards to Master Shifu, you two. 'Vadam out."

Tigress chuckled softly, holding onto Lokahviing as he signed out of the comm. "If you have a ship on the way, I imagine you need a title other than Captain."

"I already have one," Lokahviing said with a smile. "It was discussed with my holographic crew and with the Sangheili and UNSC, many years ago. If my presence was required in the field... I would take the title of Lord-Admiral."

"Lord-Admiral?" Tigress repeated. "As your girlfriend, would that make me Lady-Admiral?"

"Now you really are getting ahead of yourself," Lokahviing chuckled. Tigress chuckled with him, nuzzling her nose on his. She was just leaning down for a gentle kiss when Shifu's voice could be heard from the doorway.

"Well, since the two of you are already up, there's no need for me to wake you," he said.

Lokahviing raised an eyebrow. "There was reason to wake us?" he asked.

"It seems someone let slip the translation of _Fal Dovah Kulaan_ – and the people are starting to hail you as the Dragon Prince," Shifu said.

Lokahviing shrugged. "Eh – a par for the course at this point," he remarked.

"... Par for the course?" Shifu repeated the phrase, confused. "What does that mean?"

"It's a golf expression," Lokahviing said. "Don't worry about it."

"Anyway, breakfast is ready," Shifu stated. Tigress smiled and chuckled as she got Lokahviing to his feet and helped him down the hall to the dining room.

"Enjoy your first night sleeping with a man?" Song asked with a smile.

"You tell me," Tigress responded as she gently sat Lokahviing down, sat next to him, and tenderly kissed him, eliciting smiles and chuckles from those present.

"You two really are smitten, aren't you?" Viper asked with a broad smile.

Tigress and Lokahviing looked into each other's eyes and responded, "We really are."

"Amazing," Mantis commented. "A tiger and a dragon."

"Something few ever knew about me – I may be _dovah_ , but deep down... I have a soft spot for Tigers," Lokahviing said. "Always did." The comment broadened Tigress' smile. But it made another question form in her mind.

"Sweetheart... can I ask you something?" Tigress queried.

"Ask me anything, Tigress," Lokahviing replied.

She summoned her courage, gathered her breath, and asked, "You said, some time ago, that you had a vision before you went into exile – a vision of a paradise, a place of peace and healing. Can you... tell me what it is you saw?"

Lokahviing smiled, and for once, his face held an expression of passion and peace. "You already know the answer, darling. You always did. You stand on the very grounds of the place I saw as paradise."

Tigress closed her eyes and softly chuckled. She saw where it was going. But she wanted the others to hear it from him. "There were other places – places that could have been home. Places where you'd be at peace. What made the Jade Palace – and the valley – any different?"

Lokahviing took Tigress' hands into his own, and kissed both her wrists. "Because, baby, in that vision... I saw you. In that vision, I felt a small measure of peace, and an echo of something I'd long wanted to feel for three hundred years. And we both know you know what that is."

Tigress opened her eyes to look in to Lokahviing's. "Love," she said. "So... you came all this way looking for me. All the pain and torment, the traumas, the wars, battles, friends and enemies alike... all of it you braved just to find me."

"Well, to be fair, you found me first," Lokahviing chuckled. "I admit, I was just passing through here when we met. Sure, this place fit what I saw, but I had been fooled before."

"But it was me who compelled you to stay," Tigress surmised as food was beginning to be set on the table by Po.

"Compelled?" Lokahviing shook his head. "No. _Convinced_. When I heard your voice, saw your face for the first time... it was then that I realized that it was no illusion I was in."

"How did Oogway fit in?" Tigress asked. "When we met, you said he sent you here."

"He did," Lokahviing affirmed. "He pointed me to the last place I thought to look for you. Admittedly, I was in Russia at the time."

"The run-in with the Wu sisters," Tigress deduced. "And I imagine Oogway paid you a visit while you recovered from that incident."

"Mm-hm," Lokahviing stated. "So after I recovered and was on my feet again, I scouted this area out – transported in a good distance away so no one would see it, and walked into the village on foot; the rest, you know."

Shifu sat down. "So... we know the full story," he said. "Now that we have all the pieces assembled, what will you do now?"

"Well, the immediate concern is to rest up, recover from the events of two days ago, but besides that..." he looked at Tigress. "... venture forth on a new path with Tigress at my side – explore this new relationship."

"Did you have any other visions?" Viper asked.

"Aside from those that gave me glimpses of where my relationship with Tigress would go..." Lokahviing's face turned serious. "There was only one other; the return of Tai Lung." Silence settled around the table.

"Tai Lung will return?" Po asked.

"For what purpose?" Shifu inquired. "Vengeance for his defeat at Po's hands?"

"I don't think so," Lokahviing said with a shake of his head. "In fact... the vision suggested his return would be a quest of... atonement. How he returned to the land of the living is, frankly, beyond me, but in that vision, I could swear he felt..."

Tigress put a hand on Lokahviing's. "He felt... what?" she asked.

"... Touched by the Force," Lokahviing responded. "I speculated with Thel that the Force had something to do with his return."

"Could Thel have heard anything about Tai Lung since you've been here?" Shifu queried.

Lokahviing downed a bit of his breakfast and shrugged. "It's possible," he admitted. "But I can't imagine why Tai Lung would die here then resurface as a force-sensitive on another world."

 _"_ _A question for Tai Lung himself,"_ echoed the voice of Oogway. _"_ _As with Kyle's arrival, my students... Tai Lung's return is fate."_

"How did he return from death?" Lokahviing asked.

 _"_ _My dear friend, there is little I can tell you that cannot be explained by Tai Lung himself; all that you need know is that he will play a... prominent role, in events to come. Both in your future with Tigress, and an incident with an old enemy of yours, Kyle."_

"An old enemy of mine..." Kyle sighed. "That'd be a hell of a long list – care to be a bit more specific?"

Oogway shook his head. _"_ _As I said, there is little I can tell you that cannot be explained by Tai Lung. Show the same tolerance, empathy and forgiveness you have shown Kyle, my students – the legacies to be written on the currents of time since Kyle's arrival have only just begun."_ After that, Oogway vanished.

"Cryptic, as always," Po sighed.

"The currents of time..." Lokahviing repeated. He sighed deeply. "Interesting that Oogway would reference the _Venesetiid_ as Paarthurnax once did."

"What are you thinking?" Song asked.

"I'm not sure – but I suspect old Paarthurnax may have been in contact with Oogway at one point or another," Lokahviing suggested.

"It certainly seems possible," Shifu admitted. "In fact, it would explain how Oogway knew of you and why he sent you here."

"That would have to mean..." Tigress started.

"... Paarthurnax may still be alive," Lokahviing finished. He hummed to himself in concern, stroking his beard.

"What of this enemy of yours?" Shifu asked. "Who could it be?"

"I'm not at all certain – I have a lot of enemies," Lokahviing responded. "Only a handful were force-sensitive, none of whom should still be alive."

"How do you know?" Viper inquired.

"Because I still remember killing them," Lokahviing answered. "They were all force-users who had given in to the Dark Side; first was Skotia, and I decapitated him when he came after me; then was Zash, who was dabbling in shit she _really_ shouldn't have been, and I was forced to kill her – cut her in half and stabbed her through the heart; then came Skorpeon – guy who was once a friend who decided to wage a one-man war against the Jedi, and I had to bring him down... cut him down, and I felt the life leave him; it was after those three that the Jedi Council decided I had more than proven capable enough to join the ranks as a Jedi Knight; that was before Order 66."

"Were there any others after Order 66?" Tigress asked. Lokahviing thought for a moment, then nodded.

"Indeed, there was one other, but he's dead, too – Thanaton. The only dark force user who I knew used the title of Darth," he explained. "Real traditionalist kind of Sith, tried to get me to join him on several occasions, but after the... eighth? No, ninth, time, he decided it was better to just destroy me. The battle that took place between him and I was short-lived; I tracked him down, cut him in six different pieces and disintegrated the pieces."

"And you're sure there was no one else you missed?" Song asked.

"Positive," Lokahviing affirmed. "I can't think of anyone else."

"We'll have to ask Tai Lung when he gets here," Shifu stated.

"Regardless of whether or not he knows... we'll want to raise my ship from it's hiding place, bring it here," Lokahviing said.

"Patience, Kyle," Shifu told him. "You should recover, first – knowing you, you have your ship hidden in a place... difficult for mortals to reach."

Kyle smiled, sighing contentedly as he sat back. "Very well. But I should tell you – the ship I have now is... different than the ship I mentioned to you."

"Really?" Tigress asked playfully. "The advanced-model bird-of-prey wasn't enough?"

"It got to the point where I decided to re-materialize the ship as a much larger vessel in order to better combat bigger threats; the N'kal-class Advanced Bird-of-Prey was a nice ship, but... the VoodieH variant of the Negh'Var-class Battlecruiser was a much sturdier warship, much larger and much more heavily-armed," Lokahviing explained. "And I decked that motherfucker out. I'll have to show you – I have the schematics and modifications manifest on my computer."

"What made you change ships?" Tigress asked.

"Again – combating larger threats. Had a few run-ins with the House of Duras and one rather memorable occasion with a Borg Cube. Not a ship you'd want to face one-on-one. Anyway, after that incident with the Borg, decided I need a bigger ship," Lokahviing replied.

"What is your ship called?" Viper asked. "As I understand it, all naval vessels – even those that would sail the stars – are named according to the captain's desire."

Lokahviing smiled. "It's called the _Chimera_. Creature from ancient Greek Mythology – nasty beast."

"I can see why you named it such – it fit your rage at the time," Po commented, earning him a swift swat upside the head.

"Yeah, actually, that was the reasoning behind it, thinking back," Lokahviing chuckled. He paused as Tigress gently squeezed his hand. "Amazing, how I now live the vision I was beginning to think was never going to happen." He looked up at Tigress. "Now... I am interested in – not afraid of – what lies ahead."

"Well, for now, we keep moving on," Shifu said. "We still have Tai Lung's return to get through, and I, for one, am interested to know how he returned to life... and what he knows of this enemy of yours, Kyle."

"So am I, master... so am I," Lokahviing stated. Tigress could see the apprehension in his eyes, but absent of the real fear – he dreaded what lay ahead, but at the same time was not afraid of it; rather, he was ready to face it.

Tigress smiled, realizing how much she'd influenced him. She, too, felt ready to face the trials ahead...


	12. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

Two weeks felt like two days for Tigress. Lokahviing – who had grown comfortable with the others calling him by his real name, Kyle – was back on his feet, and began organizing a trip to his ship's hiding spot – in the South China Sea. Tigress and Lokahviing's feelings for each other continued to grow; they loved each other with a passion that neither of them knew they had. Shifu couldn't help but feel proud of them both, but for Tigress especially, having won the heart of an immortal, three-hundred-year-old dragon-shifter. Lokahviing, during the stages of planning the trip, reluctantly agreed to share his immortality with the other furious fighters on request. He initially disagreed, but eventually came to accept it and call them his "Immortal Family". He even allowed them to learn how to use his weaponry – jut in case.

The day they were to head out, Tigress, Song, and Monkey came to Lokahviing and Tigress' domicile. Tigress knocked on the door frame of the master bedroom. "You about ready, sweetheart?" she asked as Lokahviing was fiddling with an assault rifle. A metallic _click-clack-clack_ answered her question. She smiled and chuckled. "I'm almost afraid to ask, do I get one?"

Lokahviing audibly chuckled and tossed another rifle to her. "I wasn't going to set off on this op without arming you, Song, and Monkey." He tossed rifles to Song and Monkey. "I custom-tailored these tactical harnesses to each of your physiology as best I could. I don't expect any trouble on this run, but you never know."

"Coming from the guy who sees things before they happen," Monkey commented as he examined his tactical harness, then began to work himself into it.

"I've been wrong before," Lokahviing said.

"Wait, doesn't your computer have direct access to your ship?" Song asked.

"It _did_ ," Lokahviing responded. "But transporters are down – god knows why. Point is, I'm not waiting around; if there's a problem, I want to fix it. It's my ship."

" _Our_ ship, baby," Tigress corrected him. "And I know it's pointless to argue with you on this matter." She began getting into her tactical harness. "So when we get to the _Chimera_... what then?"

"We assess the ship, activate the holographic crew, and fly it here – then drop the landing beam somewhere. I'd vote above the Jade Palace or somewhere between the Palace and the Valley," Lokahviing replied.

"Why not the Valley itself?" Monkey inquired.

"Because I don't want to disrupt the villagers' lives having my ship floating above their heads," Lokahviing answered.

Tigress shrugged. "Makes sense," she agreed. "When do we head out?"

"Shifu arranged transport to Hong Kong – it's the closest city to the _Chimera_ ; it leaves in..." Lokahviing paused to check his watch. "... less than an hour."

"Then we'd better get moving," Tigress suggested as she noticed Song and Monkey fitting nicely in their harnesses.

"I'll tell you the rest of the plan en route," Lokahviing stated. They all grabbed their gear and moved out, where they were met by Shifu in the hall.

"Bring them back intact, _Admiral_ ," he told Lokahviing.

"Will do, master," Lokahviing responded. "And you'll know when we're back. Which reminds me..." he dug into his pocket and retrieved a radio. "Keep this on you." Shifu nodded wordlessly, and Lokahviing, Tigress, Song and Monkey headed off, boarded the transport, and headed off...

}}}}} {{{{{

The trip to Hong Kong took three days – which blurred past Tigress with unbelievable speed. Before she knew it, she, Lokahviing, Song, and Monkey were staring at the busy streets of the city. "Here we are – Hong Kong," Song proclaimed.

"Last time I was here was not a very pleasant experience," Monkey commented.

"Something feels... wrong, here – out-of-place," Lokahviing said.

"What is it?" Tigress asked. "What's wrong?"

"I... cannot say. This place... is teeming with life. It makes it difficult to sense anything through the Force. But I feel _something_ is amiss out here," Lokahviing answered. He unslung his rifle and flicked the safety off. "Keep your eyes open, my friends. Whatever is out here... it must not prevent us from reaching the _Chimera_." The others unslung their weapons, and followed Lokahviing into Hong Kong. The sight of four warriors armed with such alien rifles made most people stay out of their way.

"What's the next objective?" Tigress asked.

"The harbor – a boat is waiting to take us to the _Chimera_ 's coordinates," Lokahviing responded. "I just hope-"

"You there! Outlanders!" cried out a voice nearby. "Have you come to challenge the beast beneath the waters?" The group turned to see an old Rabbit, well into his advanced years, sitting in a chair.

"Excuse me?" Lokahviing asked. "What beast?"

"A beast of metal and fire lies beneath the waters out at sea – a beast alien to everyone here," the old rabbit replied. "A beast that waits for it's master's return."

"He must be referring to the _Chimera_ ," Tigress whispered. Lokahviing wordlessly acknowledged her.

"What do you know of this... beast?" he asked the old rabbit.

"It is a massive creature – far larger than anything on this world. Many speculate it is a ship. Several have tried to claim it... none have returned," the Rabbit answered. "It is said that only the beast's master can claim and command it; those that tried were punished in fire."

"That doesn't make a lick of sense," Song said. "Fires can't start underwater."

"But he is on to something that can happen underwater," Lokahviing stated. "The _Chimera_ 's anti-theft defenses." He looked at the old Rabbit. "Who were the last heroes to try and claim the beast beneath the waters?"

"Outlanders, like yourselves – draped in strange, black armor with an odd symbol, like a pointed gear. They took a boat out to the beast, and were not seen since," the old Rabbit replied. Lokahviing's face visibly turned to concern, and he walked away, motioning his head for the others to follow.

"Do you know who that old man was talking about, Kyle?" Monkey asked.

"Unfortunately, yes – the symbol and armor he described were a dead giveaway," Lokahviing affirmed. "Sith troops; they'd have an easier time getting to the _Chimera_ than anyone else here would, which begs a bigger question – why didn't the _Chimera_ send an intruder alert beacon to my computer? And why did the transporters go down?"

"They may not have been there long," Tigress suggested. "Likely within the last few days."

"Either way, we're running out of time," Lokahviing said. "Let's move." He, Tigress, Song and Monkey all headed for the harbor at a quickened pace, where they met the captain of the boat they were to take.

"I assume you're the warriors from the Jade Palace going out to the beast?" he asked.

"That's us," Lokahviing replied. "And I understand others have gone out that way, as well?"

"Aye," the captain replied. "Last ones were an odd group clad in black armor led by a creature I've not seen before – red skin, yellow eyes, tendrils growing out of his face. Really creepy, but they paid good money to go out there."

"How long ago was that?" Lokahviing asked.

"Just yesterday," the captain answered. "Regardless, your sea gear arrived shortly before you did, and the ship's set to sail."

"Sea gear?" Monkey asked as they all began to board the boat.

"Something to help us all get to the _Chimera_ and breathing apparatuses so we can reach it," Lokahviing answered.

"That deep beneath the water?" Tigress chuckled. "A wonder any of the heroes the old man mentioned actually got that deep."

"Even so, I want to get to the _Chimera_ and figure out what the hell those Sith want with it," Lokahviing said officiously. He led the team toward the aft of the boat, where their gear was waiting.

The trip took an hour and a half, during which Lokahviing gave the others a crash-course on the portable submersibles and the rebreathers. When they arrived at the coordinates, Lokahviing was the first to dive in; Tigress went in next, followed by Song and Monkey. They all activated their submersibles and their rebreathers, and followed Lokahviing deeper into the stygian depths; the deeper they went, the darker their surroundings got. After what seemed like hours – but had in reality been only a few minutes – Lokahviing's ship came into view. It was a massive vessel, far larger than anything Tigress had imagined; shaped vaguely like a bird, but with obvious weapons, and colored in shades of green and red.

 _"_ _There's an airlock I installed just shy of the bridge,"_ Lokahviing told the team. _"_ _That's our way in."_

 _"_ _And if the Sith troops are on board?"_ Song asked.

 _"_ _We take them out – they haven't been here long, so it's unlikely they've been able to do much,"_ Lokahviing replied. The team followed him to the aforementioned airlock, where they all headed inside, and waited as Lokahviing cycled the airlock. The water was pumped out, and Lokahviing again unslung his rifle. "Weapons ready, safeties off – Sith aren't the friendliest folk I know." As soon as the airlock doors parted, Lokahviing cautiously peered around the right corner with his rifle held ready, then the left; he then motioned for the others to come out.

"Where to?" Tigress asked, keeping her rifle leveled.

"This way – the bridge isn't far," Lokahviing said in a hushed tone. He led the group through a short hallway to a circular room with multiple seats and stations. Lokahviing immediately went to work on one of them. "Rex, tell me you're still online," he requested.

 _"_ _Affirmative, Admiral,"_ came an artificial voice. _"_ _Systems on standby."_

"Any idea what our Sith friends are doing on board?" Lokahviing asked.

 _"_ _They tried to take over the ship, but I locked them out of the systems with a fractal encryption code. They've been trying to break it ever since,"_ Rex answered. _"_ _Unfortunately, the holographic crew were among the systems locked down. Comms, transporters... nearly everything. The intruders seem very intent on stealing this ship."_

"Any idea who they're led by?" Tigress inquired.

 _"_ _I'm sorry, who are you?"_ Rex asked back.

"Rex, meet my girlfriend, Tigress; Tigress, this is my ship's Artificial Intelligence, Rex," Lokahviing introduced.

 _"_ _Ah – a pleasure to meet you, madame. And to answer your earlier question, they're led by a Sith Pureblood – chronometric readings indicate he's not from this timeline,"_ Rex stated.

Lokahviing froze at the mention of timeline. "Sith Pureblood... temporal anomaly..." he paused, then added, "I might know who that is. Rex, wherever our Sith friends are, open a channel."

 _"_ _You don't think-"_ Rex started.

"-That K'torr has surfaced is chief of my suspicions," Lokahviing interrupted.

 _"_ _Channel open, Admiral,"_ Rex reported.

"Attention 'Sith' intruders – K'torr, if you can hear me on this channel, please acknowledge this transmission," Lokahviing requested.

There was a long pause before the comms burped static briefly and a masculine voice bearing an odd accent responded, _"_ _Do my ears deceive me? Is that you, Kyle?"_

"Just a sec – you _know_ this guy?" Song queried.

 _"_ _Know me? He saved my life, years ago – mine, my wife's, and my then-unborn son,"_ said the accented voice. _"_ _And for the record, name's K'torr."_

"Speaking of lovely Jaesa, how is she?" Lokahviing chuckled as he worked on his console.

 _"_ _She's fine – she stayed behind with Jake on the_ Raptor _. I've been trying to circumvent the encryption here, but no luck. Any chance you can break it?"_ K'torr asked.

"Already on it – won't be but a minute; it's my ship, after all," Lokahviing responded.

 _"_ _This is the_ Chimera? _Hnh... you've made renovations, it seems,"_ K'torr chuckled.

Tigress smiled, and walked behind Lokahviing. "Old friend you never spoke of?" she asked him.

"K'torr's an old friend, yes – helped him and his wife escape the Eternal Empire's reach during a stint in a parallel universe. I held off an attack force of ships while they made a jump through a wormhole – neither of us realized it was a portal through space _and_ time; we ended up in two different timelines. I was somehow returned to the point where I accidentally crossed into that timeline; I never knew what happened to K'torr," Lokahviing explained.

"And when did this happen?" Tigress inquired.

"About three weeks after I left Sangheilios," Lokahviing replied.

"Hnh... well, at least we have a new friend," Tigress commented. "K'torr, this is Tigress – how long have you been in this 'verse?"

 _"_ _About... let's see... seven weeks. None of my team or crew have any desire to return where we came from; they all seem... intent, on starting new lives here. Regardless, miss Tigress, who are you in relation to Kyle?"_ K'torr asked.

"I'm his new girlfriend," Tigress answered. "It's a long story."

 _"_ _I'll bet – I doubt your relationship formed inside the seven weeks I've been here. We'll have to get together sometime and learn the whole story,"_ K'torr chuckled.

"Done – lockdown ended, computers decrypted. Feel free to join me on the bridge," Lokahviing said. "Rex, please reactivate the holographic crew, advise them of the intruders' clearance, and let's get the _Chimera_ to the valley." He settled into the captain's chair, with Tigress sitting next to him, and Song and Monkey standing on either side as the emitters powered up and made varied aliens appear on deck.

"Admiral on deck!" one shouted. They all snapped to attention.

"Man your stations – let's raise the _Chimera_ from the waters," Lokahviing ordered.

"Aye, sir – you heard the Admiral! Ascension Protocol!" barked one of the crewmen, a Sangheili. The varied crew manned stations, and before long, a picture of the depths of the sea came on the main viewscreen. The hull began to vibrate, creak and groan as the ship's systems awakened and began to raise the ship from the depths of the sea.

"Shaky," Tigress commented with a chuckle. "She gonna do this the whole way?"

"Just make sure your seat bags and tray tables are in their upright and locked positions," Lokahviing said. Tigress chuckled, having heard that quote before in one of her boyfriend's movies.

Outside, above water, a few passing boats would see the sea out where the beast rested beneath the waters begin to bubble – first subtly, gradually getting more obvious, until it was impossible to miss. The boats avoided this area, their captains fearing the latest visitors had awakened the beast's rage; the bubbles churned violently, until the beast could be seen emerging from the waters, lifted out of the water by an invisible hand, until it floated high in the air. The captains, frozen with fear, stared at the beast, now in the sky above their heads.

"Engage engines – set course for the Valley of Peace," was the order. The crew obeyed, and the metallic beast moved through the sky effortlessly, leaving the populace of Hong Kong – though frightened – relieved that the beast was not setting its sights on them.

}}}}} {{{{{

Shifu had been thinking to himself at the Peach Tree where he witnessed the passing of the late Oogway. Seemed fitting, given his current train of thought. He had grown fond of the immortal dragon prince, but the recent prophecy he spoke of... the return of Tai Lung... he wished Lokahviing had been jesting, but Shifu knew better; Lokahviing's jokes were significantly more light-hearted than the return of an wayward son. But the wayward child, whom Shifu believed dead, returning to the Jade Palace in a quest of atonement? Admittedly, this was what made Shifu consider perhaps Lokahviing was joking. But he saw the look on Lokahviing's face. He heard what Oogway, reluctantly returning from his well-earned rest in the realm of spirits, had said – they all did. Tai Lung was coming back. But what scared Shifu the most, is that Tai Lung had resurfaced elsewhere – as a Force-Sensitive warrior, and by the hands of one of Lokahviing's enemies, no less. What possible purpose could that serve?

The radio communicator Lokahviing had given him before he left days ago suddenly went active, speaking softly, then bursting into static briefly. Shifu picked it up and turned up the volume, and was greeted with a familiar voice: "Chimera _to Shifu, can you hear me? Over."_

" _Chimera_ , this is Shifu – I hear you... over," he responded, wondering why he had to put the 'over' part in the end of his statement.

 _"_ _Shifu, where are you at this moment? Over,"_ Lokahviing asked.

"I'm at the peach tree, over," Shifu responded.

 _"_ _Oh, good – look out toward the horizon, over,"_ Lokahviing requested.

"And I'm looking for what? _Over,_ " Shifu queried.

 _"_ _You'll see – over and out,"_ was all Lokahviing told him. Shifu looked out to the horizon, largely in the dark as to what it was he was looking for. The sun shone brightly high in the sky, and made trying to spot...

But what Shifu was looking for didn't come from the horizon – rather, as the wind swirled and picked up and an unearthly whine sounded, it came from _below_ him as a massive vessel rose up from behind the cliff face. A metallic creature of green and red, floating in the air suspended by an invisible force; it was beyond anything Shifu had ever seen before.

 _"_ _So, master – were you want this? Over,"_ Lokahviing asked.

"Over the courtyard would be nice," Shifu responded. "You said that ship has a cloaking device, right? Over," Shifu replied.

 _"_ _Affirmative – see you in a few; over and out,"_ Lokahviing stated. The _Chimera_ settled the center of the hull high above the courtyard, deployed a transparent-violet beam, then shimmered and disappeared. Shifu walked over to the courtyard in time to see Tigress, Lokahviing, Monkey and Song materialize in a sustained flash of red light.

"I trust the _Chimera_ was the way you left it?" he asked.

"More or less," Lokahviing said with a shrug. "An old friend found his way aboard, not realizing whose ship he was on. Regardless, he's on his way back to his ship; he's gonna set course for Sangheilios, help out Thel and the others there."

"You make the strangest friends, Kyle," Monkey commented.

"You'd be surprised," Lokahviing and Tigress chuckled in unison.

"Did we miss anything here?" Tigress asked.

Shifu shook his head. "Not since you left. I'm surprised you could get a ship that size all the way here on your own."

"The ship is crewed by a holographic crew," Lokahviing said.

Shifu mulled this over for a few moments, before comprehension dawned. "Can they leave the ship?" he asked.

"As long as they have a mobile emitter per hologram... yes, they can. And those mobile emitters are unbelievably easy to mass-replicate," Lokahviing affirmed.

"Incredible," Shifu said with amazement. "I wish we'd met you a lot sooner!"

"You and me both, Master," Lokahviing chuckled. The group headed inside, shed the tactical gear, and settled in for the usual activities. Lokahviing, however, continued to mentally speculate what lay ahead with the return of Tai Lung. Just what would his arrival – and quest of atonement – usher in? A new conflict? Reconciliation and forgiveness? Or, heaven forbid – _both_? Lokahviing couldn't say for certain. And he wondered just what enemy of his had the knowledge of the ancient ways of the Dark Side to bring Tai Lung back, and on another world, to boot? But he dismissed the thoughts when he crawled into bed next to Tigress for the night, feeling the answer would come in time...


	13. One Dragon's Pain, Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Tigress and Lokahviing both awoke cradled in each other's arms. Looking into the face of the other, they smiled, then shared a tender kiss. "Good morning, darling," Tigress greeted her lover.

"Good morning, beautiful," Lokahviing replied. "Sleep well?"

"Listening to you snore, yes, I did," Tigress said. "I actually find it... relaxing."

Lokahviing glanced at the clock. "We'd better get up. Coffee will be brewing, and I imagine Po will be cooking breakfast." Tigress briefly kissed Lokahviing, then got up and stretched – only to be lovingly tickled by Lokahviing. She jumped and yelped in surprise, and found herself embraced by Lokahviing from behind. He tenderly bit into the base of Tigress' neck, chuckling heartily.

"Baby, I'm a tiger; if you don't stop chewing on me, I'm gonna start chewing on you!" Tigress laughed. Lokahviing laughed softly and released Tigress' neck from his teeth, kissing where he bit her.

"I love you," he whispered in her ear.

"I love you, too," Tigress responded. They shared a sentimental moment, then began dressing, after which they walked outside the room and to the domicile kitchen, where Lokahviing poured himself a mug of coffee – and one for Tigress, at her request – and they began sipping on it as they headed for the kitchen where they assumed Po and the others were.

Nothing could prepare them for what they saw when they got there.

Tai Lung was sitting at the table, dressed in dark armor adorned with a black cloak, eating and conversing with Po, Song and Shifu. Silence settled over the room as Tigress and Lokahviing stared at Tai Lung. A soft, draconic growl escaped from Lokahviing's throat, and his hand drifted toward his crossguard lightsaber – only to be swiftly grabbed by Tigress' hand. Lokahviing didn't resist, but stared Tai Lung down. Neither of them knew just what to say. It was Tai Lung who broke the silence:

"I imagine you already know who I am."

"You could say that," Lokahviing responded. "And I imagine... Shifu, has filled you in on the details of the last few months."

"Much more than that... _Kyle_ ," Tai Lung answered. "To be frank, I am rather thrilled you are my sister's lover, but I imagine you're more interested-"

 _"_ _Sister?!"_ Tigress repeated with surprised confusion.

"Tigress," Shifu told Tigress reassuringly, "It is a surprise to me, as well; but you and Tai Lung share me as your adopted father, which makes you and him... adopted siblings."

Tigress' eyes went between Shifu and Tai Lung in shock. He was her adopted _brother_?! As much as Tigress didn't believe it, she felt in her heart Shifu was correct, though it seemed Shifu had not realized it until recently. She felt a hand take hers, and realized it was Lokahviing's, in an effort to reassure her. It took a few moments for the gravity of it all to sink in: _She had a brother._ But one question had been raised – and one that needed an answer, now.

"I do not dispute your claim as my brother, Tai Lung... but we all deserve to know," Tigress stated as the others began trickling into the room. "You are supposed to be dead. Po defeated you; When we arrived on the scene, there was nothing left of you; we believed you to be dead; and yet, here you are, alive, as a force-sensitive warrior, wearing the garb of a warrior. How? How are you alive? Who brought you back?"

Tai Lung didn't directly respond as his gaze shifted to Lokahviing. "You always knew who she was. You've clashed with her many times before."

"That's a little vague, Tai Lung," Lokahviing responded.

"She was the first of her kind to become a Sith – a warrior who learned how to indefinitely prolong her own life, and you've clashed with her so many times, in her galaxy and elsewhere; surely, you remember the name Torrentus... Darth Torrentus," Tai Lung continued.

"Torrentus..." Lokahviing hissed. He sighed, closed his eyes, and shook his head. "That is a name I grow tired of hearing."

"Who is Darth Torrentus?" Viper asked.

"She was once a proud, cunning warrior – an admiral among the Tal Shiar; Admiral Arai... before she was captured by a Starfleet task force, tried, and convicted of the destruction of the Federation-Klingon Unity Station as well as multiple Tal Shiar attacks across her 'verse," Lokahviing explained. "She was given a life sentence on a Federation penal colony... but she never arrived; her transport ship was found adrift and derelict, with no sign of Arai... she couldn't go back to the Romulan Star Empire, and when the Hobus Disaster struck, she simply vanished, and popped up later as a different person that had somehow developed a connection to the Force, trained as a Sith by an obscure Sith Lord... who named her Darth Torrentus. An appropriate name, given that in the years since, she has caused a torrent of death and destruction. Tai Lung is correct; I have clashed with her several times. Each time, I was sure it was the last, only to have her pop up again. I learned after I arrived in Klingon space at one point that she had used the power of the Dark Side to make herself immortal." He looked to Tai Lung for the longest time. "Why did she resurrect you? And how?"

"She wanted an apprentice... on her level," Tai Lung replied. "She somehow came across the legends told of me, and offered a chance at vengeance. At first, I was only too eager to accept. But over time... I grew disillusioned."

"But something put you on the path of your quest for atonement," Tigress surmised. "What was it?"

Tai Lung sighed, then sank in his seat. "It... was someone I had met in my travels, after I had escaped Torrentus. A woman. She... gave her life to protect me," he said. "She came looking for me, said she had come to save me. Her motives didn't matter – she told enough truth to get my attention. Said that Torrentus was a monster that had to be destroyed, but I was not strong enough to do so myself..." Tai Lung looked to Lokahviing. "She said you would be the key; that you would make me strong enough to destroy Torrentus once and for all."

"So, what happened to her?" Lokahviing inquired.

"Torrentus' assassins found us... she told me to run, to seek you out. She fought the assassins... I never saw her again, but I eventually learned she died to get me safely away," Tai Lung replied. "No one had ever done that for me... and it awakened a part of me that I thought had died long ago. A part of me that eventually shone like a light in the darkness of space itself. It... diminished my anger, and I began thinking of you all. When I got here, I heard so many stories... how you all had done so much... written many legacies on the currents of time..."

"And it made you determined to write your own legacy, one that would diminish the legends of Tai Lung's Rage," Lokahviing surmised. "So now that you're here... what do you intend to do?"

"I set out to redeem myself, and I intend to do so," Tai Lung answered with determination. "But heed my warning, Dragon Prince – Torrentus is out there. She searches for remnants of something called the 'Eternal Fleet'. I know not what she intends to do with it, but if she knows you're here..."

"... She could destroy this world and everything on it," Lokahviing concluded.

"Kyle... we need to warn Thel," Tigress suggested.

"Agreed," Lokahviing replied. "And I have neither a spare ship nor the desire to leave you all or this world undefended to go look for the Eternal Fleet."

"What is the Eternal Fleet?" Po inquired.

"Another time, Po – for now, I need to make a call," Lokahviing stated, motioning for Tigress to follow him. Tai Lung got up and followed them. Explaining the situation to Thel was a blur, but he seemed surprised to know Torrentus was still active; he, regardless, promised to keep watch for any further acts by the rogue Sith Lord. Indeed, before Tigress realized it, they were headed back into the kitchen, where Lokahviing explained Torrentus' origins to those who had not been present the first time. A long pause followed the second explanation, before Po asked,

"Lokahviing... this is the second time you've referenced the Hobus Disaster, and I was wondering... what exactly happened?"

Lokahviing breathed a long sigh before he answered, "Supernova... the Tal Shiar had been experimenting with Iconian technology, and in doing so, inadvertently caused the Hobus system star to go supernova. The blast ruptured subspace, and caused the shockwave to move at speeds far beyond what everyone had predicted... which destroyed the Romulan home world of Romulus and its sister world of Remus. The Romulan Star Empire had been a broken power ever since, brought low by their own hand. They've been trying to rebuild ever since, but the Romulan Republic has been the only known Romulan faction that has had success in that aspect; they also won the support of the Klingon Empire and the Federation – something the Star Empire refused to do, in their xenophobic isolation."

"And how does the Eternal Fleet fit in?" Song queried.

"The Eternal Fleet was once an unstoppable armada of identical, technologically-advanced warships that served the Eternal Empire of Zakuul, well before even my time," Lokahviing explained. "Piloted by sentient Gemini droids and armies of soldier droids called Skytroopers, the Eternal Fleet could have made the Eternal Empire the dominant faction of that 'verse under Emperor Valkorion... until his son betrayed him, killed him, and usurped his throne. Over the course of five years, Valkorion's son – Arcann – brought low the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic. Long story short, a hero emerged – a Jedi General named Draco Bellator... whose name is rather an irony, Po."

Po frowned. "How so?" he asked.

"Because Draco Bellator is Latin; it literally translates to 'Dragon Warrior'. The very title you hold," Lokahviing told him. "Anyway, Draco eventually defeated Arcann, and subsequently his sister, Vaylin, and absorbed the Eternal Fleet and the Eternal Empire into his faction and created the Eternal Alliance. From there... details are hazy, but it was eventually agreed that the Eternal Fleet could not be left to fight over. It was destroyed by Draco himself, but there were elements of the fleet... that survived. Ever since, it was rumored that the remnants of the fleet had banded together, hidden, waiting for a new master to find it again."

"That's... interesting, but doesn't really answer my question," Song said, "How does it fit in with our current situation?"

"It fits in because if Torrentus finds it, she will use it against us – if she knows where we are," Lokahviing answered. "Now, I don't know for certain whether or not she does, but I won't risk anything. That's why I warned Thel – fortunately, my flagship will be in orbit soon."

"Flagship?" Song repeated.

"A gift from Thel," Tigress told her. "Big ship. Bigger than the _Chimera_. This one is called the _Iron Regent_. And it, from what I read in the technical specs, has the power to deploy a fleet if needs be."

"Covering all the bases, huh?" Shifu chuckled.

"In my militancy, it's what I do best," Lokahviing chuckled back.

"So... what happens now?" Viper asked.

"For now... we help Tai Lung get settled in," Shifu responded. "I trust you brought your belongings along?"

Tai Lung nodded. "I did, but most of it is aboard a vessel I stole from Torrentus; don't worry, I disabled the transponder, so she cannot find me." He looked to Lokahviing and asked, "I don't suppose you have use for a Sith Infiltrator ship?"

"You got your hands on one of those?" Lokahviing queried with evident surprise. "If you have one, I'll let you land it in the shuttle bay of the _Chimera._ A ship like that is a rare find, and could come in handy in the days ahead."

"Where did you land the ship?" Tigress inquired.

Tai Lung motioned his head. "Some ways north of here, but east of the remains of a YT Model Freighter... which reminds me, do any of you know anything about that ship, like why it crashed here?"

"Ship of an old friend who was ambushed in orbit by Klingons from the House of Torg and killed after he crashed. Blew his ship up as part of a funeral pyre," Lokahviing replied.

"I see... you have my sympathies, Kyle. Regardless, if you know where that freighter is, you should have no trouble finding my ship; again, it's east of there," Tai Lung said.

Lokahviing rose from his seat and started for the exit. "Well, come on; sooner we get to your ship, sooner we can get it to the _Chimera_ and get your stuff unpacked here." Tai Lung looked to Tigress, who shrugged and rose to her feet, following her boyfriend. Tai Lung then got to his feet and moved out with them, followed by Po and Song...

(Sorry for the wait. Had some IRL things to take care of - but I am still working on this story, bit by bit. With my new work schedule, I don't have as much free time as I used to, but I will still post new chapters when they are done.)


End file.
